September 2017 – Maverick Philosopher

Saturday Night at the Oldies: September Songs

But first an old Marvelettes tune to mark the passing of Hugh Hefner. But how can you listen to just one Marvelettes number?

Beechwood 45789.

Don't Mess with Bill

Please Mr. Postman

…………………..

September ends. A transitional month leading from hot August to glorious October, Kerouac month in the MavPhil 'liturgy.'

Dinah Washington, September in the Rain

Rod Stewart, Maggie May. "Wake up Maggie, I think I got something to say to you/It's late September and I really should be back at school."

Carole King, It Might as Well Rain Until September

Frank Sinatra, September of My Years

George Shearing, September in the Rain

Walter Huston, September Song

UPDATE (10/1)

This from a London reader:

Thanks for linking to the George Shearing ‘September’. I had forgotten he grew up in London (in Battersea, just down the road from me). I love the Bird-like flights on the piano. Indeed I think he wrote ‘Lullaby of Birdland’. Another Londoner is Helen Shapiro who does a great version of ‘It might as well rain until September’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=De0_zZ7qQDA. Great alto voice, never made it in the US as far as I know. There is a strange account of her conversion to Christianity here.

I was first hipped to Shearing by Kerouac who referred to him in On the Road. I too love the'Bird'-like flights on the piano. The allusion is to Charley 'Bird' Parker, also beloved of Kerouac. (Kerouac month hereabouts starts today.) Helen Shapiro is new to me, thanks. She does a great job with the Carole King composition. Believe it or not, King's version is a demo. That's one hell of a demo. A YouTuber points out that Shapiro was not part of the 1964 'British Invasion.' I wonder why.

The Function-Argument Schema in the Analysis of Propositions

The Ostrich of London sends the following to which I add some comments in blue.

Vallicella: ‘One of Frege's great innovations was to employ the function-argument schema of mathematics in the analysis of propositions’.

Peter Geach (‘History of the Corruptions of Logic’, in Logic Matters 1972, 44-61) thinks it actually originated with Aristotle, who suggests (Perihermenias 16b6) that a sentence is composed of a noun (ὄνομα) and a verb (ῥῆμα), and the verb is a sign of something predicated of something else. According to Geach, Aristotle dropped this name-predicate theory of the proposition later in the Analytics, an epic disaster ‘comparable only to the fall of Adam’, so that logic had to wait more than two thousand years before the ‘restitution of genuine logic’ ushered in by Frege and Russell. By ‘genuine logic’ he means modern predicate logic, which splits a simple proposition into two parts, a function expression, roughly corresponding to a verb, and an argument expression, roughly corresponding to a noun. ‘To Frege we owe it that modern logicians almost universally accept an absolute category-difference between names and predicables; this comes out graphically in the choice of letters from different founts [fonts] of type for the schematic letters of variables answering to these two categories’.

The Fregean theory of the proposition has never seemed coherent to me. Frege began his studies (Jena and Göttinge, 1869–74) as a mathematician. Mathematicians naturally think in terms of ‘functions’ expressing a relation between one number and another. Thus

f(3) = 9

where ‘3’ designates the argument or input to the function, corresponding to Aristotle’s ὄνομα, ‘f()’ the function, here y=x², corresponding to Aristotle’s ῥῆμα, and ‘9’ the value of the function. The problem is the last part. There is nothing in the linguistic form of the proposition which corresponds to the value in the linguistic form of the mathematical function. It is invisible. Now Frege thinks that every propositional function or ‘concept’ maps the argument to one of two values, either the True or the False. OK, but this is a mapping which, unlike the mathematical mapping, cannot be expressed in language. We can of course write

___ is wise(Socrates) = TRUE

but then we have to ask whether that equality is true or false, i.e. whether the function ‘is_wise(–) = TRUE’ itself maps Socrates onto the true or the false. The nature of the value (the ‘truth value’) always eludes us. There is a sort of veil beyond which we cannot reach, as though language were a dark film over the surface of the still water, obscuring our view of the Deep.

BV: First a quibble. There is no need for the copula 'is' in the last formula since, for Frege, concepts (which are functions) are 'unsaturated' (ungesaettigt) or incomplete. What exactly this means, of course, is a separate problem. The following suffices:

___wise(Socrates) = TRUE.

The line segment '___' represents the gappiness or unsaturatedness of the concept expressed by the concept-word (Begriffswort).

Quibbling aside, the Ostrich makes two correct interrelated points, the first negative, the second positive.

The first is that while 'f(3) = 9' displays the value of the function for the argument 3, namely 9, a sentence that expresses a (contingent) proposition does NOT display its truth-value. The truth-value remains invisible. I would add that this is so whether I am staring at a physical sententional inscription or whether I am contemplating a proposition with the eye of the mind. The truth or falsity of a contingent proposition is external to it. No doubt, 'Al is fat' is true iff Al is fat.' But this leaves open the question whether Al is fat. After all the biconditional is true whether or not our man is, in fact, obese.

The second point is that there has to be something external to a contingent proposition (such as the one expressed by 'Socrates is wise') that is involved in its being true, but this 'thing,' — for Frege the truth-value — is ineffable. Its nature eludes us as the Ostrich correctly states. I used the somewhat vague phrase 'involved in its being true' to cover two possibilities. One is the Fregean idea that declarative sentences have both sense and reference and that the referent (Bedeutung) of a whole declarative sentence is a truth-value. The other idea, which makes a lot more sense to me, is that a sentence such as 'Socrates is wise' has a referent, but the referent is a truth-making fact or state of affairs, the fact of Socrates' being wise.

Now both of these approaches have their difficulties. But they have something sound in common, namely, the idea that there has to be something external to the contingent declarative sentence/proposition involved in its being true rather than false. There has to be more to a true proposition than its sense. It has to correspond to reality. But what does this correspondence really come to? Therein lies a major difficulty.

How will the Ostrich solve it? My impression is that he eliminates the difficulty by eliminating reference to the extralinguistic entirely.

Should We Discuss Our Differences? Pessimism versus Optimism about Disagreement

Our national life is becoming like philosophy: a scene of endless disagreement about almost everything. The difference, of course, is that philosophical controversy is typically conducted in a gentlemanly fashion without bloodshed or property damage. Some say that philosophy is a blood sport, but no blood is ever shed, and though philosophers are ever shooting down one anothers' arguments, gunfire at philosophical meetings is so far nonexistent. A bit of poker brandishing is about as far as it gets.

Some say we need more 'conversations' with our political opponents about the hot-button issues that divide us. The older I get the more pessimistic I become about the prospects of such 'conversations.' I believe we need fewer conversations, less interaction, and the political equivalent of divorce. Here is an extremely pessimistic view:

I believe the time for measured debate on national topics has passed. There are many erudite books now decorating the tweed-jacket pipe-rooms of avuncular conservative theorists. And none as effective at convincing our opponents as a shovel to the face. But setting that means aside, there is no utility in good-faith debate with a side whose core principle is your destruction. The “middle ground” is a chasm. It is instead our duty to scathe, to ridicule, to scorn, and encourage the same in others. But perhaps foremost it is our duty to hate what is being done. A healthy virile hate. For those of you not yet so animated, I can assure its effects are invigorating.

Bret Stephens offers us an optimistic view in The Dying Art of Disagreement.

Unfortunately, Stephens says things that are quite stupid. He says, for example, that disagreement is "the most vital ingredient of any decent society." That is as foolish as to say, as we repeatedly hear from liberals, that our strength lies in diversity. That is an absurdity bordering on such Orwellianisms as "War is peace" and 'Slavery is freedom." Our strength lies not in our diversity, but in our unity. Likewise, the most vital ingredient in any decent society is agreement on values and principles and purposes. Only on the basis of broad agreement can disagreement be fruitful.

This is not to say that diversity is not a value at all; it is a value in competition with the value of unity, a value which must remain subordinated to the value of unity. Diversity within limits enriches a society; but what makes it viable is common ground. "United we stand,' divided we fall." "A house divided against itself cannot stand."

Stephens goes on to create a problem for himself. Having gushed about how wonderful disagreement is, he then wonders why contemporary disagreement is so bitter, so unproductive, and so polarizing. If disagreement is the lifeblood of successful societies, why is blood being shed?

Stephens naively thinks that if we just listen to one another with open minds and mutual respect and the willingness to alter our views that our conversations will converge on agreement. He speaks of the "disagreements we need to have" that are "banished from the public square before they are settled." Settled? What hot button issue ever gets settled? What does Stephens mean by 'settled'? Does he mean: get the other side to shut up and acquiesce in what you are saying? Or does he mean: resolve the dispute in a manner acceptable to all parties to it? The latter is what he has to mean. But then no hot-button issue is going to get settled.

Stephens fails to see that the disagreements are now so deep that there can be no reasonable talk of settling any dispute. Does anyone in his right mind think that liberals will one day 'come around' and grasp that abortion is the deliberate killing of innocent human beings and that it ought be illegal in most cases? And that is just one of many hot-button issues.

We don't agree on things that a few years ago all would have agreed on, e.g., that the national borders need to be secured.

According to Stephens, "Intelligent disagreement is the lifeblood of any thriving society." Again, this is just foolish. To see this, consider the opposite:

Agreement as to fundamental values, principles and purposes is the lifeblood of any thriving society.

Now ask yourself: which of these statements is closer to the truth? Obviously mine, not Stephens'. He will disagree with me about the role of disagreement. How likely do you think it is that we will settle this meta-disagreement? It is blindingly evident to me that I am right and that he is wrong. Will he come to see the light? Don't count on it.

It is naive to suppose that conversations will converge upon agreement, especially when the parties to the conversations are such a diverse bunch made even more diverse by destrutive immigration policies. For example, you cannot allow Sharia-supporting Muslims to immigrate into Western societies and then expect to have mutually respectful conversations with them that converge upon agreement.

I am not saying that there is no place for intelligent disagreement. There is, and it ought to be conducted with mutual respect, open-mindedness and all the rest. The crucial point Stephens misses is that fruitful disagreement can take place only under the umbrella of shared principles, values, and purposes. To invert the metaphor: fruitful disagreement presupposes common ground.

And here is the problem: lack of common ground. I have nothing in common with the Black Lives Matters activists whose movement is based on lies about Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and the police. I have nothing in common with Antifa thugs who have no respect for the classical traditions and values of the university. I could go on: people who see nothing wrong with sanctuary jurisdictions, with open borders, with using the power to the state to force florists and caterers to violate their consciences; the gun grabbers; the fools who speak of 'systemic racism'; the appeasers of rogue regimes . . . .

There is no comity without commonality, and the latter is on the wane. A bad moon is rising, and trouble's on the way. Let's hope we can avoid civil war.

Sometimes the Truth is not Reasonably Believed

If a proposition is true, does it follow that it is rational to accept it? (Of course, if a proposition is known to be true, then it is eminently rational to accept it; but that's not the question.)

Hefner's death reminds me of a true story from around 1981. This was before I was married. Emptying my trash into a dumpster behind my apartment building one day, I 'spied a big stack of Playboy magazines at the bottom of the container. Of course, I rescued them as any right-thinking man would: they have re-sale value and they contain excellent articles, stories, and interviews.

I stacked the mags on an end table. When my quondam girl friend dropped by, the magazines elicited a raised eyebrow.

I quickly explained that I had found them in the dumpster and that they contain excellent articles, arguments for logical analysis, etc. She of course did not believe that I had found them.

What I told her was true, but not credible. She was fully within her epistemic rights in believing that I was lying to save face. In fact, had she believed the truth that I told her, I would have been justified in thinking her gullible and naive.

This shows that truth and rational acceptability are not the same property. A proposition can be true but not rationally acceptable. It is also easily shown that a proposition can be rationally acceptable but not true. Truth is absolute; rational acceptability is relative to various indices.

"But what about rational acceptablity at the Peircean ideal limit of inquiry?"

Well, that's a horse of a different color. Should I mount it, I would trangress the bounds of this entry.

As for Hugh Hefner, may the Lord have mercy on him. And on the rest of us too.

Was Hefner a Condition of the Possibility of Post-’60s Feminism?

Damon Linker:

By mainstreaming pornography in Playboy magazine, and valorizing the pursuit of (male, heterosexual) hedonistic pleasure with his highly publicized playboy lifestyle, Hefner made a singularly important contribution to the overthrow of received norms of sexual morals that made modern (post-1960s) feminism possible. But he also accomplished this overthrow by exploiting women, reducing them to sex objects for use (and sometimes abuse) in the satisfaction of the insatiable (and now unconstrained) male libido.

If Linker's claim is that no sort of post-1960s feminism could have arisen without Hef's mainstreaming of pornography, valorization of male hedonism, and overthrow of received sexual norms, then I doubt it. A sort of equity feminism could have arisen without the Hefnerian excesses and without women aping the basest elements in men. I'd be interested in hearing what Christina Hoff Sommers would have to say about this.

That Playboy was a necessary condition of the possibilility of Playgirl is a more credible claim than that the Playboy lifestyle was a necessary condition of the possibility of the rise of any sort of worthwhile post-1960s feminism.

Cultural Confidence

What we lack is not military might, but cultural confidence. The Left's long march through the institutions has been remarkably successful.

I now hand off to Mark Steyn, Statue of Limitations.

Mirror Images

Leftist whining about 'cultural appropriation' and Alt-Right denial of the universality of certain cultural goods may be mirror images of each other. The shared assumption is that cultural goods are not universal but can be owned.

The theorem of Pythagoras has his name on it but neither he nor his descendants own it.

The same goes for the life-enhancing bourgeois values lately preached by Amy Wax.

The Poisoned Will of Jean Meslier

Before Voltaire, Meslier.

Time to Defund the NFL

Some important points re: the NFL flag and anthem controversy.

1) In its third clause, the First Amendment to the U. S. Constitution states, "Congress shall make no law . . . abridging freedom of speech or of the press." This protects the U. S. citizen from any attempt from the side of the U. S. government to squelch free expression. It does not protect a citizen who is in the employ of a private concern from attempts by the employer to limit speech or expression. The kneeling football players while on the field of play have no First Amendment free speech rights. Their employers may fire them just as Google was within its legal rights when it fired James Damore.

The difference is that Google was morally wrong for firing an engineer who spoke the politically incorrect truth, while the club owners are morally wrong if they do not fire the overpaid, disrespectful football players.

2) What the kneelers appear to be protesting is imaginary. Jason Riley:

The players have said they are protesting the unjust treatment of blacks by law enforcement and cite the spate of police shootings that have come to light in recent years. Team owners and NFL officials will have to decide whether to continue indulging such behavior on company time, but the larger question is whether what is being protested has some basis in reality beyond anecdotes and viral videos on social media.

Hard data, however, shows that the protests are hollow. Heather Mac Donald:

The FBI released its official crime tally for 2016 today [25 September 2017], and the data flies in the face of the rhetoric that professional athletes rehearsed in revived Black Lives Matter protests over the weekend. Nearly 900 additional blacks were killed in 2016 compared with 2015, bringing the black homicide-victim total to 7,881. Those 7,881 “black bodies,” in the parlance of Ta-Nehisi Coates, are 1,305 more than the number of white victims (which in this case includes most Hispanics) for the same period, though blacks are only 13 percent of the nation’s population. The increase in black homicide deaths last year comes on top of a previous 900-victim increase between 2014 and 2015.

3) Whether or not the kneelers have anything real to protest, they of course have a right to their opinion. They ought to express it in the proper venue. They also have a moral obligation to get the facts straight and form correct opinions, an obligation they are not fulfilling.

4) Just as the kneelers have a right to their opinion, as foolish and destructive as it is, President Trump has a right to his sane and reasonable one: "Fire the sons of bitches!" My thought exactly. His expression is harsh but justified. There is such a thing as righteous anger.

5) The vicious and destructive Left promotes the lie that Trump's call for a firing of the louts is 'racist.' Not at all. If you believe that lie, you are not only stupid, but vile and deserve moral condemnation.

The kneelers are both white and black, and even if they were all black, race doesn't come into it. The kneelers are being condemned for their lack of civility, their disrespect for the USA, it values, its flag, its anthem, its war heroes, and for injecting politics into what ought to be an apolitical event.

There was a jackass on Tucker Carlson's show the other night who absurdly claimed that 'Fire the sons of bitches" is code for 'Fire the niggers." That is beneath refutation, but it does indicate what scum leftists are.

6) There is also the issue of federal, state, and local subsidies of football franchises using tax dollars. And it is not just the misuse of public funds to build stadiums. The NFL gets billions in subsidies from U. S. taxpayers. That ought to anger you even if you are a football fan. Football is of interest only to some people, does not serve the common good, lowers the general level of a culture, and its subsidy to the benefit of some is not part of the legitimate functions of government.

7) The NFL and the scumbags of the Left don't care what you think and will ignore what you have to say, no matter how reasonable. The only effective way to punish this collection of bastards is by defunding them. Boycott the games and don't buy the merchandise. If you really must watch the game of football, watch the college variety.

Hugh Hefner Dead at 91

There is so much to say.

For now, just this: If you have devoted your whole soul to the enjoyment and promotion of the pleasures of the flesh, then you had better hope that the soul dissolves with the dissolution of the body. Contemporaries will think that of course it does, but it is not quite obvious, is it?

Hef thought of himself as a liberator and good person. But then I think of all the abortions, all the betrayals, all the marriages and families destroyed by the sexual revolution to which Hef was a major contributor.

Guardian article here.

David French, Hugh Hefner's Legacy of Despair

Thomas Merton’s Hostility to Scholastic Manualism and the Forgotten Fr. Hickey

As much of a flaky liberal as Thomas Merton (1915 – 1968) is, both politically and theologically, I love the guy I meet in the pages of the seven volumes of The Journals of Thomas Merton. I am presently savoring Volume Six, 1966-1967. This morning I came upon the entry of May 21, 1967, Trinity Sunday, in which he reports being "dazzled and baffled" by a new book on quantum physics by George Gamow.

The 52-year-old gushes excitedly over the accomplishments of "Niels Bohr and Co." and "this magnificent instrument of thought they developed to understand what is happening in matter, what energy really is about — with their confirmation of the kind of thing Herakleitos was reaching for by intuition." (237) Now comes the passage the vitriol of which caught my attention:

What a crime it was — that utterly stupid course on "cosmology" that I had to take here [at the Trappist monastery of Gethsemani in the 1940s] (along with the other so-called philosophy in Hickey's texts!). Really criminal absurdity! And at the time when the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima! Surely there were people in the order who knew better than [to] allow such a thing! Dom Frederic, no. He couldn't help it. The whole Church still demanded this, and God knows, maybe some congregation still does. (237-238)

Now I have read my fair share of scholastic manuals, including Klubertanz, Vaske, van Steenberghen, Garrigou-Lagrange, Smith & Kendzierski, and a some others, but I was unfamiliar with this Hickey. Curious to see how bad his manuals could have been, I did some poking around but came up with very little. But I did glean some information from Benjamin Clark, O.C.S.O., Thomas Merton's Gethsemani:

We used as text the three-volume series by J.S. Hickey, abbot of Mount Melleray in Ireland 1932-1934, a text quite widely used in seminaries in the United States at the time. The text was in Latin, but English was spoken in class, unlike some seminaries in the United States at the time where the philosophy lectures were still given in Latin. Most of our students did not have enough Latin background for that, and some found even reading the text rough going at times.

Does anybody have volumes from the Hickey series? Is he willing to part with them? What about scholastic cosmology as presented by Hickey got Merton so worked up?

My desultory research also led me to a quotation from a guy I know quite well:

At any rate, a recent blog post by Bill Vallicella got me thinking about it again. The post is ostensibly about the origins of political correctness. In reflecting on that, Vallicella also had this to say:

By the time I began as a freshman at Loyola University of Los Angeles in 1968, the old Thomism that had been taught out of scholastic manuals was long gone to be replaced by a hodge-podge of existentialism, phenomenology, and critical theory. The only analytic fellow in the department at the time was an adjunct with an M. A. from Glasgow. I pay tribute to him in In Praise of a Lowly Adjunct. The scholasticism taught by sleepy Jesuits before the ferment of the ‘60s was in many ways moribund, but at least it was systematic and presented a coherent worldview. The manuals, besides being systematic, also introduced the greats: Plato, Aristotle, Thomas, et al. By contrast, we were assigned stuff like Marcuse's Eros and Civilization. The abdication of authority on the part of Catholic universities has been going on for a long time.

So, how bad was scholastic manualism?

Edward Feser counts as a latter day manualist. See his Scholastic Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction (Editiones Scholasticae, 2014). Here is an article by Ed in which he lays into David Bentley Hart to repel the latter's charge of scholastic manualism. Excerpt:

Menacing references to the threat of “manualism” and “baroque neoscholasticism” have long been a favored tactic in theologically liberal Catholic circles. Given Aquinas’s enormous prestige and influence within the Catholic Church, attacking some position he took has always been a tricky business. The solution was to invent a bogeyman variously called “manualism,” “sawdust Thomism,” etc. This allows the critic to identify the hated position with that and proceed as if it has nothing to do with Thomas himself. Such epithets generate something like a Pavlovian response in many readers, subverting rational thought and poisoning the reader’s mind against anything a Thomist opponent might have to say. Though neither a theological liberal nor a Catholic, Hart knows what buttons to push in order to win over the less-discriminating members of his audience.

An Identity-Political Paradox

Leftists hold that borders and walls are 'racist' and 'hateful' and 'fascist' and that the nation state is an illegitimate construct. They bristle at talk of national identity and national sovereignty. Is it not then paradoxical for these same leftists to embrace identity politics at the sub-national level?

And if walls are 'racist' and 'hateful' then so is Obama's Wall:

God, Necessity, and Truth

Jacques e-mails:

You think that if God exists, He exists necessarily, and if He does not exist, He does not exist necessarily. But suppose that God does not exist. We agree, I think, that we can't rationally rule out the possibility? For instance, you've often argued that our evidence doesn't settle the question of theism versus atheism. But then, supposing that God doesn't exist, and supposing that He might not exist in the actual world (for all we know), isn't it evident that regardless there are lots of truths? For instance, even if God does not exist, it would still be true that He does not exist, or that He does not exist necessarily. I'm not sure that you'd agree with this, but if you would, shouldn't you also agree that if God does not exist, there are some truths?

That is not quite what I said. I accept what I call Anselm's Insight: if God exists, then he exists necessarily; if he does not exist, then necessarily he does not exist. What does not exist necessarily might be contingent; what necessarily does not exist is impossible. I know you understand the idea; it is just that your formulation suffers from scope ambiguity. Anselm's Insight, then, is that God is either necessary or impossible. He is necessarily non-contingent. (The non-contingent embraces both the necessary and the impossible.) In the patois of possible worlds, either he exists in every, or in no, world. If you wonder why I don't capitalize 'he,' it is because I hold that while piety belongs in religion, it does not belong in philosophy of religion.

Agreed, we cannot rationally rule out the possibility of God's nonexistence. I would say we cannot rationally rule it out or rule it in. "But then, supposing that God doesn't exist, and supposing that He might not exist in the actual world (for all we know), isn't it evident that regardless there are lots of truths? "

I would rewrite your sentence as follows:

It is epistemically possible that God not exist. Nevertheless, it is evident that there are truths.

I agree with the rewrite. It is evident that there are truths, but for all we can claim to know, God does not exist. But this leaves open how God and truth are related. Here are five different views:

1) There is truth, but there is no God.

2) There is truth, and there is God, but God is not the ontological ground of truth.

3) There is truth, there is God, and truth ultimately depends on the existence of God. There is truth because there is God.

4) There is no truth, because there is no God.

5) There is God, but no truth.

Ad (1). This I would guess is the view of many. There are truths, and among these truths is the truth that God does not exist. This, I take it, would be the standard atheist view.

Ad (2). This, I take it, would be the standard theist view among analytic philosophers. Consider a philosopher who holds that God is a necessary being and also holds that it is necessarily the case that there are some truths, but would deny the truth of the subjunctive conditional, If, per impossibile, God were not to exist, then truths would not exist either.

Ad (3). This is the view that I am inclined to accept. Thus I would affirm the subjunctive conditional lately mentioned. The difference between (2) and (3) is subtle. On both sides it is held that both God and truths are necessary, but the Augustinian — to give him a name — holds that God is the ultimate 'source' of all truth and thus all intelligibility, or, if you prefer, the ultimate 'ground' of all truth and intelligibility.

Ad (4). This is Nietzsche's view.

Ad (5). I have the impression that certain post-Nietzschean POMO-heads hold this. It is view not worth discussing.

I should think only the first three views have any merit.

Each of the three has difficulties and none of the three can be proven.

I will mention quickly a problem for the admittedly plausible first view.

Among the truths there are necessary truths such as the laws of logic. Now a truth is a true truth-bearer, a true proposition, say. Nothing can have a property unless it exists. (Call this principle Anti-Meinong). So no proposition can have the property of being true unless the proposition exists. A necessary truth is true in every metaphysically possible world. It follows that a necessarily true proposition exists in every possible world including worlds in which there are no finite minds. But a proposition is a thought-accusative that cannot exists except for a mind. If there is no God, every mind is contingent. A contradiction ensues: there is a world W such that, in W, there exists a thought-accusative that is not the thought-accusative of any mind.

Here are some ways an atheist might 'solve' the problem:

a) Deny that there are necessary truths.

b) Deny that truth is any sense a property of propositions.

c) Deny Anti-Meinong.

d) Deny that propositions are thought-accusatives; accept some sort of Platonism about propositions.

But each of these denials involves problems of its own which I would have no trouble unpacking.

What say you, Jacques?

Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?

Here:

"Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?" my father used to say. It drove me crazy when he said that. Now, it's dawned on me that he was right.