Here:
It’s been exactly 40 years since my late wife and I quit as English profs at Middlebury College, where hundreds of screaming students wouldn’t allow Charles Murray, one of the nation’s foremost conservative intellectuals, to speak to them yesterday, as a campus conservative group had invited him to do.
See also The Middlebury Meltdown.
Here:
Neven Sesardic’s recent book, When Reason Goes on Holiday, provides a detailed account of the morally questionable actions undertaken in the interest of political causes by some of the most important philosophers in the analytic tradition: Otto Neurath, Rudolf Carnap, Imre Lakatos, Donald Davidson, Hilary Putnam, among several others. Some of their actions were not just questionable from a moral point of view, but outright reprehensible. Yet, as Sesardic points out in the conclusion to his book, the reaction from the philosophical community has been one of utter indifference . . . .
My plug of Sesardić below.
I have never made a budget in my life. Never having made one, I have never had to adhere to one. The budgeter is involved in a negative enterprise: he essays to control and curtail spending. He allocates so much money for this, and so much for that, and strives to stick to his limits. But positive methods are often superior to negative ones. If you want to lose weight, for example, it is better to exercise and burn more calories, while holding your caloric intake constant, than to eat less while holding steady on caloric expenditure. (Aside from the optimal course which is to do both at the same time.) Part of the reason for this is that it is harder to break an old habit than to begin a new one.
Similarly with budgeting. To budget is to approach your personal finances negatively when a positive approach is superior. Instead of setting limits to spending in various categories, specify target savings and investing amounts, and aim high. The Wealthy Barber has a chapter entitled "The Ten Percent Solution." As I recall, the author recommends investing 10% of gross income for long-term growth. That's chickenfeed to my conservative mind. We save and invest far more than this. The best way to do this, of course, is by automatic payroll deduction. You arrange for your employer to direct deposit some percentage of your income into the account of your choice. You then live on what is left over.
Why do you need a budget? If you are self-disciplined you will naturally watch your spending, and of course you will never ever use a credit card for its credit feature. You will use it only for its float, record-keeping, rebate, and convenience features. Allow me to brag so as to make a point that is very important for everyone. I have never paid a cent of credit card interest in my life, and in the last several years, each year I have received $400- $500 cash in rebates for the use of a couple of cards which charge me no fee for their use. The credit lines are huge but I go nowhere near them, and the interest rates I could not care less about. Not only that, but the 'float' makes me even more money. Let's say I have the use of $2,000 for six weeks. During that period the goods are in my possession but the money is at my disposal in a cash reserve account earning interest.
Suppose you are a leftist knucklehead who hates 'corporate America.' What better way to stick it to the credit card companies than by becoming a free-rider?
So I ask again, why do you need a budget? If you are self-disciplined you will naturally watch your spending, and if you are not self-disciplined then you will lack the discipline to adhere to your budget. Or is this a false alternative?
When I was a graduate student, 'back in the day,' I lived on 2-3 K per annum. That was in Boston, one expensive town. And then I got a job which paid for starters the princely sum of 12 K per annum. I said to myself: "Surely, I can save and invest half of that!" But attitude is everything. Attitude and will and good judgment. For example, if you are inclined to become financially independent, then you would be a fool to marry someone whose idea of Nirvana is a wallet full of charge cards with unlimited credit lines.
The moral side of the economic problem is paramount to a conservative like me. Those who can deny themselves and defer gratification can become financially well-off in a stable political and economic environment such as we enjoy in these United States. But of course people will not deny themselves and defer gratification. So they must suffer the consequences. The problem is akrasia, weakness of the will. The fundamental problem is not predatory credit card companies, subprime mortgage scammers, and the payday loan sharks. For if you are self-disciplined, cautious, and diligent, they will not be able to get a handle on you.
Cathy Young explains how not to combat PC.
For an explanation of what political correctness is and is not, see A Mistaken Definition of 'Political Correctness' and a 'Correct' Definition. Written with the clarity, rigor, and good sense you have come to expect, and for which you pay nothing. What a deal!
The third related article below is really good and you should read it for your own good.
And then there is Schroedinger's troll.
Seldom Seen Slim comments and I respond in blue:
Enjoyed your Sunday post on Pyrrhonism. It’s been a while since I worked on Sextus, but it strikes me that your essay on the Skeptics’ route to adoxia passes by an important premise: the attainment of equipoise and proper role of philosophy.
The skeptics don’t depend upon a normative principle like (o), but in fact a (stronger) claim that it is impossible to believe or assent to a proposition for which the evidence is strongly divided. Just as assent to what is evident in experience is involuntary, so lack of assent is an involuntary response, not merely a good policy, in the face of divided evidence. It is psychologically impossible to assent in those circumstances.
BV: I argued that without the normative principle
0) One ought to withhold assent from any proposition for which the evidence is not demonstrative/compelling
one would not be able to move validly from
1) There is no compelling reason to accept either T or its negation ~T
to
2) One ought to suspend judgment by withholding assent from both T and ~T.
Suppose one is in a state of doxastic equipoise as between T and its negation ~T: one has no evidential grounds for preferring the thesis to its negation. What ought one do? Some say one ought to suspend judgment. My point was that one cannot validily infer the obligation to suspend judgment from the fact that one is in a state of doxastic equipose without assuming the principle of intellectual integrity, (0). I then went on to argue that this principle is a doxastic commitment of the Pyrrhonian skeptic and that therefore the skeptic cannot be said to be free of all beliefs.
Slim's point, I take it, is that the question of either rationally or morally justifying suspension of judgment does not arise for the skeptic since it is psychologically impossible to be in the state of evidential equipoise and not suspend judgment. Just as no one is a doxastic voluntarist with respect to the sensed sweetness of honey, no one is a doxastic voluntarist with respect to suspension of judgment in a state of evidential equipoise.
There are two questions here. One concerns the interpretation of Sextus. The other concerns how things stand in reality. The second is my main interest. I say it is quite possible to be in a state of equipose with respect to a pair of contradictory propositions and to assent to one rather than the other. What is actual is possible, and I actually affirm theism (the proposition that God exists) despite my belief that the arguments for and against balance and cancel. Therefore, it is possible for a person to be in a state of evidential equipose with respect to a pair of contradictory propositions and to assent to one rather than the other. This also shows that equipoise is not the same state as suspension. I suspect that S. S. Slim is conflating the two.
Let us think about this more carefully. What I am concerned to understand is the transition from the state of equipoise to the state of suspension. They are obviously not the same state. Why does the skeptic, when he is in equipoise, suspend belief? I can think of three answers.
a) Because it is psychologically impossible for him to believe once the state of evidential equipoise has been reached. Suspension follows involuntarily upon equipoise.
b) Because conflicting beliefs are disturbing; mental disturbance is incompatible with ataraxia; the latter is required for happiness (eudaimonia); the skeptic wants to be happy. Our skeptic voluntarily chooses to suspend belief for the sake of happiness.
c) Because of a commitment to a principle of intellectual integrity that requires one not to believe beyond the evidence. Our skeptic voluntarily suspends belief in situations in which contradictory claims balance and cancel to satisfy a precept of the ethics of belief.
Ad (a). This is Slim's view. It strikes me as obviously false. Suppose Old Man Clanton has never run a marathon and that the evidence for and against his completing the 26.2 mile course in the allotted time is evenly balanced. What's to stop Clanton from choosing to believe he can do it? Nothing. He voluntarily believes beyond the evidence. There is nothing psychologically impossible about this. What's more, believing beyond the evidence in a situation like this is both rationally and morally justifiable. We all know that effort follows belief: If I believe I can do something, I will make a greater effort, and will be more likely to pull it off.
I am unsure about what Sextus would say, but what I have read of him and his commentators suggests that he too would reject (a)., and that his reasons for suspension are (b) and (c). But I am open to refutation on this point if Slim or anybody can send me some text references.
The skeptics, recall, are zetetics, resolute inquirers into contentious philo questions like the existence of God. A thorough philosophical inquiry, the Skeptics believe, will take us to the point where strong arguments on both sides robustly oppose each other. This is a point of evidential equipoise, and the mind’s innate response to equipoise is to believe in or assent to neither. Equipose is spontaneously both a stable and a tranquil state of mind, free of contentious loyalties and anxious self-doubt.
Would that this were so! And obviously the skeptic is also not free of a whole set of dogmatic beliefs about how the mind must and cannot assent. And desire also follows automatically on assent, so if we believe in God, for example, we must desire a God-pleasing life. But philosophy enables us to escape doubtful, turbulent beliefs and commitments and to control what we believe and desire by taking us to a state of equipoise and so non-assent and tranquility.
A question I would give to you is whether philo inquiry ever takes us to something like equipoise, and if does, is this a stable and tranquil state.
BV: Slim may be conflating the state of equipoise with the state of suspension. But if he isn't, I would grant only that some people suspend belief in evidential equipoise, not all. After all, there are pragmatic and prudential reasons for belief in addition to evidential ones. Does being in equipoise lead to mental tranquillity? Not invariably.
Too many of the academic philosophers of consciousness are overly concerned with the paltriest aspects of consciousness, so-called qualia, and work their tails off trying to convince themselves and others that they are no threat to physicalism.
While man's nobility lies in the power of thought whereby he traverses all of time and existence, our materialists labor mightily to make physicalism safe for the smell of cooked onions.
A NYRB review. (HT: the enormously helpful Dave Lull)
To put it bluntly and polemically: Thomas Nagel is the real thing as philosophers go; Daniel Dennett is a sophist.
My Nagel category; my Dennett category.
Killer Quote:
I am reminded of the Marx Brothers line: “Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?” Dennett asks us to turn our backs on what is glaringly obvious—that in consciousness we are immediately aware of real subjective experiences of color, flavor, sound, touch, etc. that cannot be fully described in neural terms even though they have a neural cause (or perhaps have neural as well as experiential aspects). And he asks us to do this because the reality of such phenomena is incompatible with the scientific materialism that in his view sets the outer bounds of reality. He is, in Aristotle’s words, “maintaining a thesis at all costs.”
That's right. When a line of reasoning issues in an absurdity such as the absurdity that consciousness and its deliverances are illusions, then what you have is a reductio ad absurdum of one or more of the premises with which the reasoning began. Dennett assumes physicalism and that everything can be explained in physical terms. This leads to absurdity. But Dennett, blinded by his own brilliance — don't forget, he counts himself one of the 'brights' — bites the bullet. He'd rather break his teeth than examine his assumptions.
Another thing struck me. Dennett makes much of Wilfrid Sellars' distinction between the manifest and scientific images. 'Image' is not quite the right word. An image is someone's image. But whose image is the scientific image? Who is its subject? It is arguably our image no less than the manifest image. Nagel quotes Dennett as saying of the manifest image: "It’s the world according to us." But the same, or something very similar, is true of the scientific image: it's the world in itself according to us. Talk of molecules, atoms, electrons, quarks, and strings is our talk just as much as talk of colors and plants and animals and haircuts and home runs.
The world of physics is the world as it is in itself according to us. Arguably, the 'according to us' gets the upper hand over the 'in itself' relativizing what comes within the former's scope much like Kant's transcendental prefix, Ich denke. Das 'ich denke' muss alle meine Vorstellungen begleiten koennen . . . . "The ''I think' must be able to accompany all my representations." (KdrV, B 131-2)
Arguably, the world of physics is a mind-involving construct arrived at by excluding the mental and abstracting away from the first-person point of view and the life world it reveals. I am alluding to an idealist approach to the problem of integrating the first- and third-person points of view. It has its own problems. But why is it inferior to a view like Dennett's which eliminates as illusory obvious data that are plainly not illusory?
Time was when absolute idealism was the default position in philosophy. Think back to the days of Bradley and Bosanquet. But reaction set in, times have changed, and the Zeitgeist is now against the privileging of Mind and for the apotheosis of Matter. (But again, matter as construed by us. Arguably, the scientific realist reifies theoretical constructs that we create and employ to make sense of experience.) Because idealism is out of vogue, the best and brightest are not drawn to its defense, and the brilliant few it attracts are too few to make much headway against the prevailing winds.
Now I'll tell you what I really think. The problem of integrating the first- and third-person points of view is genuine and perhaps the deepest of all philosophical problems. But it is insoluble by us. If it does have a solution, however, it certainly won't be anything like Dennett's.
Although Dennett's positive theory is worthless, his excesses are extremely useful in helping us see just how deep and many-sided and intractable the problem is.
. . . but only if they assimilate.
Federalism is what I recommend to ease tensions and preserve the Union. Patrick J. Buchanan explains it well. His piece concludes:
A new federalism—a devolution of power and resources away from Washington and back to states, cities, towns and citizens, to let them resolve their problems their own way and according to their own principles—may be the price of retention of the American Union.
Let California be California; let red state America be red state America.
