The abuse of the physical frame by the young and seemingly immortal is a folly to be warned against but not prevented, a folly for which the pains of premature decrepitude are the just tax; whereas a youth spent cultivating the delights of study pays rich dividends as the years roll on. For, as Holbrook Jackson (The Anatomy of Bibliomania, 121 f.) maintains:
No labour in the world is like unto study, for no other labour is less dependent upon the rise and fall of bodily condition; and, although learning is not quickly got, there are ripe wits and scholarly capacities among men of all physical degrees, whilst for those of advancing years study is of unsurpassed advantage, both for enjoyment and as a preventative of mental decay. Old men retain their intellects well enough, said Cicero, then on the full tide of his own vigorous old age, if only they keep their minds active and fully employed; [De Senectate, 22, tr. E. S. Shuckburgh, 38] and Dr. Johnson holds the same opinion: There must be a diseased mind, he said, where there is a failure of memory at seventy. [Life, ed. Hill, iii, 191] Cato (so Cicero tells us) was a tireless student in old age; when past sixty he composed the seventh book of his Origins, collected and revised his speeches, wrote a treatise on augural, pontifical, and civil law, and studied Greek to keep his memory in working order; he held that such studies were the training grounds of the mind, and prophylactics against consciousness of old age. [Op. cit. 61-62]
The indefatigable Mr. Jackson continues in this vein for another closely printed page, most interestingly, but most taxingly for your humble transcriber.
I was a little unfair to Elizabeth Harman the day before yesterday. I said she has "presented perhaps the most lame abortion argument ever made public." As knuckleheaded as her argument is, there is one that is worse.
This is an updated version of a language rant first published in October 2013.
……………
You've heard of the Soup Nazi. I'm the Language Nazi. And that's my cat, Heinrich.
1. Toe the line, not: tow the line.
2. Tough row to hoe, not: tough road to hoe.
3. Rack one's brains, not: wrack one's brains.
4. Wrack and ruin, not: rack and ruin.
5. Flout the law, not: flaunt the law.
6. Give advice, not: give advise. "He advised her to take his advice cum grano salis."
7. Cum grano salis, not: cum grano Sallust. (This one's a joke; I just made it up.)
8. One and the same; not: one in the same.
9. Same thing, not: same difference. One of those moronic expressions that is so bad it's good. Tom: "That's a firefly!" Dick: "Its a glowbug!" Jethro: "Same difference!" This is not to suggest that there aren't correct uses of 'same difference.'
10. Regardless, not: irregardless. Say 'irregardless' and you probably chew tobacco.
11. I couldn't care less, not: I could care less. Almost as moronic as (9).
Yahoos seem naturally to gravitate toward double negative constructions which they use as intensifiers. For example, 'I can't get no satisfaction' to mean can't get any. 'No' here is an intensifier not a negator. "Nothing ain't worth nothing, but it's free." (Kris Kristofferson) This double negation as intensification is probably what is going on in (9) and (10) as well.
In each case, though, the speaker conveys his meaning. So does it matter whether one speaks and writes correctly? Does it matter whether one walks down the street with one's pants half-way down one's butt?
In the Italian language, the double negative construction is not only not incorrect, but mandatory. That ain't no shit. Italians are famously good at doing nothing. La dolce vita and all that. Dolce far niente (sweet to do nothing) is a favorite Italian saying. My paternal grandfather Alfonso had it emblazoned on his pergola; me, I've been meaning to do the same for my stoa. I just haven't gotten around to it.
'We do nothing' in grammatically correct Italian is: Noi non facciamo niente. Literally: we don't do nothing.
14. Ceteris paribus, not: ceterus paribus, which confuses the ‘-ibus’ ending with nominative. It is an ablative absolute construction ‘with all else equal’. (Via London Ed. Latin: Don't throw it if you don't know it.)
Prepared lines come in handy in many of life's situations. They are useful for getting points across in a memorable way and they make for effective on-the-spot rebuttals.
A mind well-stocked with prepared lines is a mind less likely to suffer l'esprit d'escalier.
Suppose a feminist argues that men have no right to an opinion about the morality of abortion. Without a moment's hesitation, retort: Arguments don't have testicles!
A curious new abortion argument by Princeton's Elizabeth Harman is making the rounds. (A tip of the hat to Malcolm Pollack for bringing it to my attention.) It is not clear just what Harman's argument is, but it looks to be something along the following lines:
1) "Among early fetuses there are two very different kinds of beings . . . ."
2) One kind of early fetus has "moral status."
3) The other kind of early fetus does not have "moral status."
4) The fetuses possessing moral status have it in virtue of their futures, in virtue of the fact that they are the beginning stages of future persons.
5) The fetuses lacking moral status lack it in virtue of their not having futures, in virtue of their not being the beginning stages of future persons.
Therefore
6) If a fetus is prevented from having a future, either by miscarriage or abortion, then the fetus does not have moral status at the time of its miscarriage or abortion. "That's something that doesn't have a future as a person and it doesn't have moral status." (From 5)
7) If a fetus lacks moral status, then aborting it is not morally impermissible.
Therefore
8) " . . . there is nothing morally bad about early abortion."
Some will say that this argument is so bad that it is 'beneath refutation.' When a philosopher uses this phrase what he means is that an argument so tagged is so obviously defective as not to be worth refuting. There is also the concomitant suggestion that one who refutes that which is 'beneath refutation' is a foolish fellow, and perhaps even a (slightly) morally dubious character when the subject matter is moral inasmuch as he undermines the healthy conviction that certain ideas are so morally abhorrent that they shouldn't be discussed publicly at all lest the naive and uncritical be led astray.
But to quote my sparring partner London Ed, in a moment when the muse had him in her grip: "In philosophy there is a ‘quodlibet’ principle that you are absolutely free to discuss anything you like." That's right. The Quodlibet Principle is one of the defining rules of the philosophical 'game.' There is nothing, nothing at all, that may not be hauled before the bench of reason, there to be rudely interrogated. (And that, paradoxically, includes the Quodlibet Principle!)
I hereby invoke that noble and indeed Socratic principle in justification of my attention to Harman's argument.
What's wrong with it? She is maintaining in effect that the moral status of a biological individual depends on how long it lasts. Accordingly, moral status is not intrinsic to the early fetus but depends on some contingent future development that may or may not occur. So the early fetus that developed into Elizabeth Harman has moral status at every time in its development, because it developed into what we all recognize as a person and rights-possessor, while an aborted early fetus has moral status at no time in its development because it will not develop into a person and rights-possessor.
This issues in the absurd consequence that one can morally justify an abortion just by having one. For if you kill your fetus (or have your fetus killed), then you guarantee that it has no future. If it has no future, then it has no moral status. And if it has no moral status, then killing it is not morally impermissible, and is therefore morally justified.
Is it ever morally right and reasonable to question or impugn motives or character in a debate?
I have just demolished Harman's argument. She has given no good reasons for her thesis. Quite the contrary. She has presented perhaps the most lame abortion argument ever made public. But what really interests me is the bolded question. And I mean it in general. It is not about Harman except per accidens.
Is it ever morally right and reasonable in a debate to question motives and character? I didn't get a straight answer from London Ed in an earlier discussion. So I press him again.
We agree, of course, that arguments stand and fall on their own merits in sublime independence of their producers and consumers. I have hammered on this theme dozens of times in these pages. One may not substitute motive imputation and character analysis for argument evaluation.
But once I have refuted an argument or series of arguments, am I not perfectly morally justified in calling into the question the motives and character of the producers of those arguments? I say yes.
I have a theory about what really drives the innumerable bad pro-abortion/pro-choice arguments abroad in this decadent culture, but I leave that theory for later. Here I pose the bolded question quite generally and apart from the abortion question.
A certain commie and I were were friends for a time in graduate school, but friendship is fragile among those for whom ideas matter. Unlike the ordinary non-intellectual person, the intellectual lives for and sometimes from ideas. They are his oxygen and sometimes his bread and butter. He takes them very seriously indeed and with them differences in ideas. So the tendency is for one intellectual to view an ideologically divergent intellectual as not merely holding incorrect views but as being morally defective in so doing.
Why? Because ideas matter to the intellectual. They matter in the way doctrines and dogmas mattered to old-time religionists. If one's eternal happiness is at stake, it matters infinitely whether one 'gets it right' doctrinally. If there is no salvation outside the church, you'd better belong to the right church. It matters so much that one may feel entirely justified in forcing the heterodox to recant 'for their own good.'
The typical intellectual nowadays is a secularist who believes in nothing that transcends the human horizon. But he takes into his secularism that old-time fervor, that old-time zeal to suppress dissent and punish apostates. It is called political correctness.
And as you have heard me say more than once: P.C. comes from the C. P.
I'm for half-open borders, borders open in the outbound direction. Anyone who wants to emigrate should be allowed to do so.
Communists need walls to keep people in, we need walls to keep them out. Hence the rank absurdity of the comparison of a wall on our southern border to the Berlin Wall. Now the mendacious leftists who make this comparison cannot be so historically uninformed as not to see its rank absurdity. But they make it anyway because they will say or do anything to win. They are out for power any way they can get it.
It is interesting that even hate-America leftists do not want to leave the United States. They talk about it, but few do it. And where do they say they will go? Canada is high on the list. Why not Mexico? Are they perhaps racists?
is not epistemically certain. I don't deny that (1) is true; I deny that it can be known with certainty. (As I explained earlier, truth and certainty are different properties.) And then I wrote that
If an argument is presented for (1), then I will show that the premises of that argument are not, all of them, certain.
That is to say: if you try to show that (1) is certain by producing a valid deductive argument all of the premises of which are certain, an argument that transmits the certainty of its premises to its conclusion, then I will show that the premises of that argument are not, all of them, certain. I am using 'certain' as short for 'epistemically certain.'
Let us play that game. I believe I have an argument to prove (1) that can be reduced exclusively to obvious conceptual truths. Let's go step by step; you say which premise you doubt and I will produce an argument for it.
My kick-off:
(1.1) Whatever does not have a cause and yet exists, exists necessarily. (1.2) Whatever begins to exist never exists necessarily. Ergo etc.
Which one do you doubt?
I have no problem with (1.2). I would say, however, that (1.1) is not certain. The negation of (1.1) is: Something exists contingently without cause. This is not a formally self-contradictory proposition. So we cannot rule it out on formal-logical grounds alone the way we can rule out Something exists that does not exist. It is therefore logically possible (narrowly logically possible) that (1.1) be false.
Is (1.1) a conceptual truth as Lukas appears to be maintaining? Well, can we know it to be true by sheer analysis of the concept uncaused existent? Not as far as I can see. Analyzing that concept, all I get is: existent that is not the effect of any cause or causes. That every EFFECT has a cause is a conceptual truth, but not that every EVENT has a cause, or that every EXISTENT has a cause.
If Lukas is right, then it is epistemically certain that the physical universe, which is modally contingent (i.e., not necessary and not impossible) cannot be a brute fact. So if Lukas is right, then it is epistemically certain that the physical universe cannot exist both contingently and without a cause.
Here is where I disagree. I believe that the physical universe (together with finite minds) exists, exists contingently, and is caused. But I don't believe that we can know this to be the case with certainty.
It may be that Lukas is thinking along the lines of Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange.
Garrigou-Lagrange thinks that one violates the Law of Non-Contradiction if one says of a contingent thing that it is both contingent and uncaused. He thinks this is equivalent to saying:
A thing may exist of itself and simultaneously not exist of itself. Existence of itself would belong to it, both necessarily and impossibly. Existence would be an inseparable predicate of a being which can be separated from existence. All this is absurd, unintelligible. (Reality: A Synthesis of Thomistic Thought, tr. Patrick Cummins, O. S. B., Ex Fontibus 2012, p. 65)
Suppose that a contingent existent is one that is caused to exist by a self-existent existent. If one then went on to say that such an existent is both contingent and uncaused, then one would embrace a logical contradiction. But this presupposes that contingency implies causal dependency.
And therein lies the rub. That the universe is contingent I grant. But how does one get from modal contingency to the universe's causal dependence on a causa prima? If one simply packs dependency into contingency then one begs the question. What is contingent needn't be contingent upon anything.
The so-called Red Scare of the '50s and '60s was not a scare but a genuine threat. For a real red scare see my man Hanson, Why Does the Left Suddenly Hate Russia?
The piece concludes:
So what drives this about-face?
Not the fact that Russia tried to cause chaos in 2016, as it has for many years with all Western democracies. Perhaps it is only because a supposedly unbeatable Hillary inexplicably lost to the unlikely Donald Trump — thanks to her own campaign’s incompetence rather than Russian collusion.
Had Hillary Clinton just campaigned in Wisconsin once, and more in Pennsylvania and Michigan (and less in Georgia and Arizona), President Hillary Clinton might now be lecturing us about her reset 2.0 outreach to Vladimir Putin.
Instead, a moment after her electoral demise, “the Russians did it” trope bloomed, the disseminated Steele–Fusion GPS file resurfaced to become the buzz of the properly toadyish media, and “collusion” was born — a charge that so far has not proven true, even though it has consumed thousands of hours of investigations, and millions of hours of media hysteria.
As a result of a McCarthy-like Russian-under-every-American-bed hysteria, we now have all became far less safe in an already very, very dangerous world.
My friends in the teaching trenches tell stories that lead me to believe that so-called 'higher education' is now little more than 'higher remediation.'
