Month: December 2018

Saturday Night at the Oldies: The Wall (of Sound)

There is a lot of talk of walls these days. I need a break. Here are some of my favorite Phil Spector productions.  It wouldn't have been the 'sixties without him. I avert my eyes from his later misadventures and remember him for his contributions to the Boomer soundtrack.

Crystals, Uptown, 1962.

Crystals, He's a Rebel

Ronettes, Be My Baby

Crystals, Da Doo Ron Ron

Curtis Lee, Pretty Little Angel Eyes.

Great dance video. Curtis Edwin Lee, one-hit wonder, hailed from Yuma, Arizona.  He died at 75 years of age on 8 January 2015.  Obituary here. His signature number became a hit in 1961, reaching the #7 slot on the Billboard Hot 100. When I discovered that the record was produced by the legendary Phil Spector, I understood why it is so good.  After the limelight, Lee returned to Yuma for a normal life. This tune goes out to wifey, with love.  When I first espied those angel eyes back in '82, I had the thought, "Here she is, man, the one for you. Go for it!" And I did, and its been very good indeed.

Ben E. King, Spanish Harlem, 1960.

Crystals, Then He Kissed Me

Beach Boys, Then I Kissed Her. With a tribute to Marilyn M.

Paris Sisters, I Love How You Love Me, 1961.

Ronettes, Walkin' in the Rain

Possible Worlds Again: Thomist versus ‘Analyst’

Fr. Matthew Kirby by e-mail:

By the way, in thinking about my comments on the [your] SEP entry I realised that I had used the term "possible worlds" in an idiosyncratic way, one non-standard within the analytical school, applying a Thomist twist to it. Unlike standard usage, I do not include a hypothetical transcendent First Cause as an element within any "possible world", but instead define possible worlds in that context as potential concrete totalities that may result from God's choice with respect to creation. Thus God Himself is not an element of any possible world (though His supernatural actions ad extra can be) on this construal, as possible worlds are each a sum of finitised, dependent, created being/s considered across their development.

 

What Fr. Kirby says certainly make sense.  Talk of God existing in every possible world comes naturally to analytical theists who are concerned to affirm the divine necessity. Such talk, however, is bound to sound strange to those of a traditional bent who quite naturally think of God as the transcendent creator of the world, a creator who could have created some other world or no world at all, and its therefore 'outside of' every possible world.

 

Herewith, some comments in clarification.

 

Let's start with the obvious point that 'world' supports a multitude of meanings. (I once cataloged a dozen or so distinct uses of the term.)  If we use 'world' to refer to the totality of what exists, then, if God exists, he is in the world: he is a member of that all-inclusive totality of entities.  If, on the other hand, we use 'world' to refer to the totality of creatures, where a creature is anything at all that is created by God, then God is not in the world.  God, after all, does not create himself: he is the uncreated creator of everything distinct from himself.  So God does not count as a creature.

 

So far, then, two senses of 'world.' World as totality of entities and world as totality of creatures. God is in the first totality, but not in the second. But a Thomistic theist such as Fr. Kirby might balk at my placing God in the totality of entities.  If God exists or is, however, then God is an entity.  (I define an entity as anything that is or exists.)  To put it in Latin, even if God is esse, he is nevertheless ens, something that is.  God is at once both Being (esse) and ens (being).  Note my careful distinction between the majuscule and miniscule  'B/b.'  In fact, if God is ipsum esse subsistens, self-subsistent Being, then he can't be other than every being; he must be both Being and being.  God is Being in its prime instance, which is to say: God is both esse and ens, Being and being. More on this later, since Fr. Kirby seems to disagree.

 

Unless one is treading the via negativa with Dionysius the Areopagite and Co., one must admit that God is. 

 

I hasten to add that, while God is both esse and ens, and therefore is, he is not an ens among entia, a being among beings. So I grant that God fits somewhat uneasily within the totality of entities. For while he is an entity, he is the one being that is also identical to Being. (How is this possible? Well, that is the problem  or perhaps mystery of divine simplicity.) Still, God is.

 

I have distinguished two senses of 'world.'  World as totality of entities and world as totality of creatures. But there is a third sense: world as a maximal state of affairs.  "The world is all that is the case. The world is the totality of facts, not of things." (These are the first two propositions of Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.)  This is pretty close to the main (not the only) analytic understanding of 'world' in talk of possible worlds.

 

Here, then, is one  'analytic' approach. The actual world is the total way things are. A merely possible world is a total way things could have been or could be. The actual world is the total way things are, but not the things that are that way. Thus the actual world is not the same as the universe, whether physical or physical plus any nonphysical items there  are.  Why not? 

 

The plausible line to take is abstractist. Worlds are maximal (Fregean) propositions and thus abstract entities or maximal (abstract) states of affairs, as on A. Plantinga's scheme in The Nature of Necessity.  They are not maximal mereological sums of concreta, pace that mad dog extreme modal realist, David Lewis, may his atheist bones rest in peace.  If worlds are propositions, then actuality is truth. That is one interesting consequence. Another is that worlds are abstract objects which implies that the actual world must not be confused either with the physical universe (the space-time-matter system) or with that plus whatever nonphysical concreta (minds) that there might be. And if worlds are abstract objects then they are necessary beings.  So every possible world exists in every possible world.

Does Everyone Have a Religion? Even Atheists?

Andrew Sullivan opines,

Everyone has a religion. It is, in fact, impossible not to have a religion if you are a human being. [. . .]

By religion, I mean something quite specific: a practice not a theory; a way of life that gives meaning, a meaning that cannot really be defended without recourse to some transcendent value, undying “Truth” or God (or gods).

Which is to say, even today’s atheists are expressing an attenuated form of religion.

Sully is not being specific enough. Consider Communist ideology. It is a practice, not just a theory. It is a way of life that gives meaning. It appeals to values that transcend the current situation such as the value of a classless society free of exploitation and alienation, a society with no need of the illusory consolations of religion, a society in which that opiate will not be needed because each will realize himself to the fullest in the here and now. Pie here below will obviate the hankering for pie in the sky. It is easy to see how so many millions in the 20th century could be recruited to the Communist cause. 

On Sully's definition, godless communism is a religion that rejects religion, which is to say: it is not a religion on any appropriate understanding of that term. Sully's definition is not specific enough, sullied as it is by being too broad.

Sullivan ought to say something sensible. I suggest the following. Human beings have very strong worldview needs.  Doxastic security needs, I call them. It is impossible not to have some worldview or other, tacit or explicit, unexamined or examined, uncritically imbibed from one's social environment or worked out for oneself. No human being lives, or can live, adoxastos, without beliefs, and in particular without action-guiding beliefs, beliefs that direct, as well as overarching beliefs that orient us in the scheme of things. Not even the Pyrrhonian can pull it off.

Now, in the genus worldview, distinguish two species: religious and non-religious.  Communism, being militantly atheistic and anti-religious, is a non-religious worldview. By contrast, Catholicism is a religious worldview.

At this point you ought to ask me for the specific difference.  If rationality is what distinguishes human from non-human animals,  what property or set of properties distinguishes religious from non-religious worldviews?  My answer in The Essence of Religion.

No good purpose is served by calling atheism a religion. It is a cheap piece of journalistic sloppiness too often maintained, too infrequently reflected upon.

Love Untranslated

Love untranslated into action remains an emotion and in many cases a mere self-indulgence. One enjoys the warm feeling of benevolence and risks succumbing to the illusion that it suffices.  Benevolent sentiments are no doubt better than malevolent ones, but an affectless helping of a neighbor who needs help, if that is possible, is better than cultivating warm feelings toward him without lifting a finger.  We ought to be detached not only from the outcome of the deed, but also detached from its emotional concomitants.

I occurs to me that what I just wrote has a Kantian flavor: one acts from duty, not inclination. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) held that the moral worth of an action accrues from its being done from duty, whether or not inclination is along for the ride. It is a mistake to read him as saying that only acts done from duty alone, with no admixture of inclination, have moral worth.  Doing from duty what one is disinclined to do has no more moral worth than doing from duty what one is inclined to do.

“And the Word Was Made Flesh and Dwelt Among Us” (John 1:14)

Let us meditate this Christmas morning on the sheer audacity of the idea that God would not only enter this world of time and misery, but come into it in the most humble manner possible . . . . Read the rest here.

It is a 'sermon' you will not likely hear in any Catholic Church.  What you will hear in the decadent Catholic churches of the present day is all manner of diversionary pablum as if designed to keep one from confronting the Christian narrative in its full strength. The few exceptions will prove the rule.

 

A Christian Koan

Man is godlike and therefore proud.  He becomes even more godlike when he humbles himself.

The central thought of Christianity, true or not, is one so repellent to the natural human pride of life that one ought at least to entertain the unlikelihood of its having a merely human origin.  The thought is that God humbled himself to the point of entering the world in the miserably helpless and indigent way we in fact do, inter faeces et urinam, and to the point of leaving it in the most horrendous, shameful, and excruciating way the brutal Romans could devise, and from a most undistinguished spot, a hill in an obscure desert outpost of their empire.

A Weird ‘Fregean’ Ontological Argument

London Ed asks:

Which step of the argument below do you disagree with?

a) If a sentence containing a proper name is meaningful, then the proper name is meaningful, i.e. it designates.

This is a standard assumption about compositionality.

BV: I have a  problem right here. I accept the compositionality of meaning. But a proper name can have meaning without designating anything.  As I see it, meaning splits into sense (Sinn) and reference (Bedeutung).  And I don't see any need to distinguish between reference and designation. So there can be a proper name that has meaning (sense) without designating anything. 'Vulcan' (the planet) is an example.   Here is another:

'Kepler died in misery.'  The sentence is meaningful; hence, by compositionality, 'Kepler' is meaningful.  Now assume that presentism is true and that only present items exist. Then Kepler does not exist.  (Of course he does not exist now; the presentist implication is that he does not exist at all.)  If Kepler does not exist at all, then he cannot now be referred to or designated.  But when I now assertively utter 'Kepler died in misery,' I assert a proposition that is true now and is therefore meaningful now. It follows that the meaning of 'Kepler' is not exhausted by its designatum.  'Kepler' is not a mere Millian tag.  There may be Millian tags, but ordinary proper names are not such. 

Now London Ed is, I think, a presentist. If so, he ought to be open to the above argument.

b) If the proper name does not designate, the sentence containing it is not meaningful (contraposition).

BV: That is the case only if the meaning of a name = its referent, the thing designated.  That cannot be. Consider 'Vulcan does not exist.' It's true, hence meaningful. So 'Vulcan' has a meaning, by compositionality. If so, and if meaning = referent, then 'Vulcan' does not have meaning. Contradiction. Ergo, a proper name can have meaning without designating anything.  Negative existentials are a real problem for Millian theories of names.

c) If ‘God does not exist’ is true, then ‘God’ does not designate.

BV: No doubt.

d) If ‘God does not exist’ is true, then ‘God does not exist’ is meaningless.

BV: That is the case only on the assumption that the meaning of a name is exhausted by its reference, i.e., that the meaning of a name just is its designatum.  The assumption is false.

e) ‘God does not exist’ is not meaningless. (it is something debated over many centuries, no firm conclusion so far)

BV: That's right!

f) ‘God does not exist’ is meaningful, but not true (d and e above)

BV: That follows, but (d) is false.

g) ‘God does exist’ is true (excluded middle)

 BV: Valid move, but again (d) is false. So argument unsound.

h) Therefore God exists (disquotation)

BV: Valid inference, but again unsound.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Tunes of the Season

BoulevardierMerry Christmas everybody.  Pour yourself a drink, and enjoy.  Me, I'm nursing a Boulevardier.  It's a Negroni with cojones: swap out the gin for bourbon.  One ounce bourbon, one ounce sweet vermouth, one ounce Campari, straight up or on the rocks, with a twist of orange.  A serious libation.  It'll melt a snowflake for sure. The vermouth rosso contests the harshness of the bourbon, but then the Campari joins the fight on the side of the bourbon. 

Or you  can think of it as a Manhattan wherein the Campari substitutes for the angostura bitters.  That there are people who don't like Campari shows that there is no hope for humanity.

Cheech and Chong, Santa Claus and His Old Lady
Canned Heat, Christmas Boogie

Leon Redbone and Dr. John, Frosty the Snowman
Beach Boys, Little St. Nick.  A rarely heard alternate version.

Ronettes, Sleigh Ride
Elvis Presley, Blue Christmas.  This one goes out to Barack and Michelle as their legacy continues to wither away.

Jeff Dunham,  Jingle Bombs by Achmed the Terrorist.  TRIGGER WARNING! Not for the p.c.-whipped.

Porky Pig, Blue Christmas

Captain Beefheart, There Ain't No Santa Claus on the Evening Stage

Charles Brown, Please Come Home for Christmas

Wanda Jackson and the Continentals, Merry Christmas Baby
Chuck Berry, Run Rudolph Run

Eric Clapton, Cryin' Christmas Tears
Judy Collins, Silver Bells

Ry Cooder, Christmas in Southgate
Bob Dylan, Must Be Santa

Is this the same guy who sang Desolation Row back in '65? 

Bob Dylan, Red Cadillac and a Black Moustache. Not Christmasy, but a good tune.  Remember Bob Luman? His version. Luman's signature number.

Who could possibly follow Dylan's growl except

Tom Waits, Silent Night.  Give it a chance. 

A surprising number of Christmas songs were written by Jews.  

The Spam Corral is Acting Up Again

Esteemed commenters Fr. Kirby and Mr. Bagwill got sent to the spam corral for no good reason. Or rather their comments did. I apologize for that. Their comments are now visible. I shall have to descend into Comment Limbo on a daily basis now to see who is hanging out in those murky precincts.