If I grant you that, will you grant me that the fetus growing within her is not her own body, but a separate body, a separate biological individual, a separate life?
Related: The Woman's Body Argument
Month: July 2018
Saturday Night at the Oldies: Hours of the Day
Mamas and Papas, Twelve Thirty
Benny Goodman, One O'Clock Jump
Lovin' Spoonful, Six O'Clock
Thelonious Monk, Round Midnight
Rolling Stones, Midnight Gambler
The Vogues, Five O'Clock World
Blind Boy Fuller, Ten O'Clock Peeper
Eric Clapton and B. B. King, Three O'Clock Blues
Skip James, Four O'Clock Blues
The Unbearable Hilarity of Hillary
Her gravitas having given way to levitas, I am half expecting her to begin levitating into Wolkenskukuheim, a word I found in Schopenhauer translatable as Cloud Cuckoo Land. In plain English, Hillary Clinton is losing her mind in a bid to establish once and for all the psychological reality of TDS, Trump Derangement Syndrome.
Her latest sample of brain leakage is her suggestion that President Trump's wise SCOTUS pick, the distinguished and widely-lauded Brett Kavanaugh, is fixing to turn back the clock to 1850 and bring back slavery.
Hillary in 2020!
Millianism and Presentism: An Aporetic Pentad
A Millian about proper names holds that the meaning of a proper name is exhausted by its referent. Thus the meaning of 'Socrates' is Socrates. The meaning just is the denotatum. Fregean sense and reasonable facsimiles thereof play no role in reference. If so, vacuous names, names without denotata, are meaningless.
Presentism, roughly, is the claim that present items alone exist. This implies that no past or future items exist in the sense of 'exists' that the presentist shares with the eternalist who maintains that past, present, and future individuals all exist. What exactly this sense is is a nut we will leave for later cracking.
Now Socrates is a wholly past individual: he existed, but he does presently exist. It follows on presentism that Socrates does not exist at all. The point is not the tautology that Socrates, who is wholly past, does not exist at present. The point is that our man does not exist, period: he is now nothing at all.
We now have the makings of an aporetic pentad:
1) 'Socrates' has meaning. (Moorean fact)
2) The meaning of a proper name is its referent. (Millian thesis)
3) If a name refers to x, then x exists. (Plausible assumption)
4) 'Socrates' refers to a wholly past individual. (Moorean fact)
5) There are no past individuals. (Presentism)
It is easy to see that the pentad is logically inconsistent: the limbs cannot all be true. Which should we reject?
Only three of the propositions are candidates for rejection: (2), (3), (5). Of these three, (3) is the least rejectable, (5) is the second least rejectable, and (2) the most rejectable.
So I solve the pentad by rejecting the Millian thesis about proper names.
You might budge me from my position if you can give me a powerful argument for the Millian thesis.
Here, then, we have an 'aporetic' polyad that is not a genuine aporia. It is soluble and I just solved it.
The Recalcitrant Ostrich will probably disagree.
The Kavanaugh Nomination: Leftist Crazy Talk at Yale
This press release rendered the letter signatories, who include several law school and Yale College professors, “ashamed” of their alma mater. “Judge Kavanaugh’s nomination presents an emergency—for democratic life, for our safety and freedom, for the future of our country,” the letter stated. The use of “safety” rhetoric signals that we are in prime identity-politics territory. Students across the country regularly claim that they are unsafe at college campuses—threatened by reading Milton, threatened by politically unorthodox views. “Without a doubt,” the letter continues, “Judge Kavanaugh is a threat to the most vulnerable. He is a threat to many of us, despite the privilege bestowed by our education, simply because of who we are.” This fear, the authors clarify, is not hyperbole. “People will die if he is confirmed,” the letter alleges.
What can we do about the destructive, self-induced stupidity of 'liberals'? I have noticed that even a crazy-headed 'liberal' can achieve a modicum of clear thinking when money is at issue. So one thing you can do is withhold funds. If you are a Yale alumnus or alumna, and not a self-enstupidated bonehead, then, when Yale asks for money, tell them "No money for you until you regain your sanity."
But be kind to the poor peon who is calling you during the dinner hour. Be kind, but be firm.
A Lying Deep State Crapweasel to the Very End
And cocky to boot. George Neumayr on Peter Strzok:
The cockiness of Strzok at Thursday’s hearing is a reflection of the immunity that ruling-class mandarins enjoy in liberal Washington. He was testifying from the safety of the deep state and thus knew that he could lie his head off without consequence. How else to explain his unrepentant opening statement, with its blatant anti-Trump special pleading? The statement sounded like it had been written by Rachel Maddow, resting on the lamest and hackiest of MSNBC-style talking points, that “today’s hearing is just another victory notch in Putin’s belt and another milestone in our enemies’ campaign to tear American apart.”
Hats off to Trey Gowdy & Co. for their services to the Republic.
Rethinking the Presumption of Atheism
Keith Burgess-Jackson just sent me his article Rethinking the Presumption of Atheism (Int J Philos Relig (2018) 84:93-111). I hope to read it soon.
Should a Pro-Lifer Advocate the Killing of Abortionists?
Mike Valle on his Facebook page raises the title question in these terms: "If you believe that abortion is truly murder, then wouldn't it be incumbent on you to kill an abortion doctor? After all, wouldn't you kill a serial killer in the act? " One way to construe the question is as follows. Is it logically consistent for a pro-lifer to hold both of the following:
a) Abortion is morally wrong.
b) Killing abortionists is morally wrong.
To focus the issue, let's consider only cases of third-trimester abortion in which both fetus and mother are healthy and normal, the pregnancy did not result from rape or incest, and the mother's carrying the child to term will not endanger the mother's life. To sharpen the issue even more, suppose the fetus is likely to be born within a week.
To my mind, abortion in a case like this is a grave moral evil for reasons I supply elsewhere, for example here. If you agree with me on this, is it "incumbent on you," i.e., morally necessary for you, to at least try to kill any late-term abortionists you are in a position to kill? Or is it morally justifiable to hold both (a) and (b)?
Answer A. Yes, one can hold both (a) and (b) because all intentional killing of humans is wrong, regardless of who the humans are, what they have done and what they have left undone. This pacifist answer is no good because it rules out killing in self-defense, just war, capital punishment, and suicide, and surely at least one of these is morally justifiable. Surely some intentional killing of human beings is morally justifiable.
Answer B. Yes, because abortion is legal and we have a moral obligation to uphold the rule of law by obeying particular laws and by not taking the law into our own hands. This is a much better answer. The rule of law is a precious thing because civil order is a precious thing. Laws enacted and enforced by proper procedures have a prima facie claim on our respect. To tolerate mass lawbreaking is to invite social chaos. We should work within the system to have the abortion laws changed.
Answer B is better than Answer A although it is not quite satisfactory. I myself am not about to kill abortion providers, nor do I advocate that anyone else do so. In explanation I would invoke something like Answer B.
But if I am not willing to kill abortion providers, do I really believe that abortion is a grave moral evil? Yes, I really believe it. My belief is demonstrated by such actions as voting and arguing against abortion over many, many entries that have cost me a lot of time and effort without making me a cent. Note that if a person lacks the full courage of his convictions, in the sense that he is not willing to sacrifice his life or liberty for them, it does not follow that he lacks convictions. Most of us are moral mediocrities and I am no exception. The fact that my efforts to save the unborn are paltry and insignificant does not show that I do not really believe that abortion is wrong.
Explaining American Leftists, Part I
Three Stages of Trump Derangement Syndrome
The Higher Hypocrisy
A man is only a man. If he tries to live like an angel, he may end up a hypocrite attempting the impossible. A man ought to live up to his highest possibilities. But what they are and where they lie is unknown until he seeks them out, risking hypocrisy as he does so. There is the hypocrisy of those who make no attempt to practice what they preach. And there is the hypocrisy of those who have the will to practice what they preach but cannot practice it because their ideals are too lofty for them.
Alan Dershowitz Interview on MSNBC
Amazing the patience Dershowitz displays toward the know-nothing ideologue interviewing him.
Presentism: The Triviality Objection
Presentism in the philosophy of time is the thesis that the present moment enjoys an ontological privilege over the other two temporal modi. The basic idea is that only (temporally) present items (individuals, events, times) exist. If so, past and future items do not exist. What is no longer is not, and what is not yet is not. Presentism presupposes the A-theory of time according to which pastness, presentness, and futurity are monadic properties irreducible to the B-relations earlier than, simultaneous with, and later than. Presentness is an absolute property. To say of an event that it is present is not to say that it is simultaneous with a reference to it or perception of it.
Presentism, then, is the claim all that exists is present, or
P) Nothing exists that is not present.
On a present-tensed reading of 'exists,' however, (P) collapses into a tautology:
P1) Nothing presently exists that is not present.
This trivial truth is not what the presentist intends. What he intends is a restriction of temporal things, things in time, to present things:
P2) Nothing exists in time that is not present.
I am assuming that there are timeless things, numbers for example. If there are no timeless things, and everything is in time, then (P2) reduces to
P2*) Nothing exists that is not present.
The trouble with (P2) and its starred cousin, however, is that they seem obviously false. Boston's Scollay Square no longer exists. That is: it did exist, but it does not now exist. Given that it did exist, it is a temporal item as opposed to an atemporal item such as a number. Now it it reasonable to think that its being past has consigned it to utter nonexistence? Arguably not. Here is a little argument.
a) What exists is actual.
b) What does not exist is either merely possible or impossible.
c) If a wholly past object such as SS does not exist, then it is either merely possible or impossible. From (b)
d) It is not the case that SS is either merely possible or impossible: what passes away does not become merely possible or impossible.
e) SS exists. From (c), (d), by modus tollens.
f) SS is not present. Datum.
g) Something exists in time that is not present. From (e), (f).
The intuition behind the argument is that actuality includes the past. An historian is neither a fiction writer nor a speculator about the merely possible. If it is true that Socrates drank hemlock, then there there was a time when Socrates drinks hemlock, Socrates himself, not his haecceity.
The foregoing is a version of the triviality objection to presentism. It has the form of a dilemma. (P) is trivally true if read as (P1) or trivially false if read as (P2), and these are the only two ways of reading (P). Either way it is trivial.
Convinced?
For a full-blown technical treatment, see Ulrich Meyer, The Triviality of Presentism.
The Lunatic Left
Check out the Seven Theses of one Phil Green over at the lair of Howlin' Wolff.
This is the direction in which the Dems are headed.
Saturday Night at the Oldies: An Appeal to Obstructionist Democrats
Wilbert Harrison, Let's Work Together. Canned Heat cover. The original beats all covers.
Youngbloods, Get Together
Jackie De Shannon, Put a Little Love in Your Heart This one goes out to Maxine Waters. You reap what you sow. Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind.
Jackie De Shannon, What the World Needs Now is Love. Love trumps hate, Nancy Pelosi.
And while we've got this cutie (Jackie, not Nancy!) cued up: When you Walk in the Room. Needles and Pins. Bette Davis Eyes. Kim Carnes' 1981 version was a drastically re-arranged cover.