Month: March 2019

Conceiving the Afterlife: Life 2.0 or Beatific Vision?

This weekend I had the pleasure of a visit from Dale Tuggy, noted philosopher of religion.  We discussed a number of topics at table and on trail including imago dei, the nature of forgiveness, the role of Platonism in Christianity, and death and afterlife.  His position on the latter topic I would characterize as 'Life 2.0,' the essentials of which I set forth below in a slightly revised version of an entry from 2013.  I see Dale as a sort of spiritual materialist whereas he probably sees me as a kind of gnostic or Platonizer whose conception of the afterlife is so hopelessly abstract as to be devoid of  any human meaning. I recently wrote in Soteriology for Brutes?

. . . the Beatific Vision will so entrance those of us who get to enjoy it that we will give no thought to our sublunary animal companions. But this is consistent both with their survival and with their non-survival of their bodily deaths. Perhaps my cats will go to cat heaven where they will be compensated for their suffering here below, but I will be so swept up into the Visio Beata as to give them no thought at all, any more than I will give any thought to that Gibson ES 335 that I never should have sold.

IMG_0423On our long ramble over desert trails on Saturday morning, Dale eloquently defended his view, one I respect   while respectfully rejecting. I have no illusions about dissuading him from it any more than I expect ever to get him to see that God cannot be a being among beings, a topic we have vigorously discussed on several occasions, see here, for example.   Agreement here as elsewhere is out of reach, and perhaps not even reasonably pursued; mutual clarification of differences, however, is well within reach, and worth pursuing.   That is my aim below.

 

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As far as I can tell, the popular Islamic conception of the afterlife is unbelievably crass, a form of what might be called 'spiritual materialism.' Muslims get to do there, in a quasi-physical hinterworld, what they are forbidden to do here, for example, disport with virgins, in quantity and at length. And presumably they are not wrapped up, head-to-foot, like the nuns of the 1950s. You can play the satyr with their nubility for all eternity without ever being sated. But first you have to pilot some jumbo jets into some skyscrapers for the greater glory of Allah the Merciful.

That the afterlife is a garden of sensuous delights, a world of goodies with none of the bad stuff endemic to our sublunary sphere, strikes me as a puerile conception. It is a conception entertained not only by Muslims but also by many Christians. And even if many do not think of it in crassly hedonistic terms, as I am sure Dale Tuggy does not, they think of it as a prolongation of the concerns of this life including the petty ones.   They think of it, in other words, as Life 2.0, an improved version of life here below.  This, however, is not what it is on a sophisticated conception:

 . . . the eternal life promised by Christianity is a new life into which the Christian is reborn by a direct contact between his own personality and the divine Spirit, not a prolongation of the 'natural' life, with all its interests, into an indefinitely  extended future. There must always be something 'unworldly' in the Christian's hopes for his destiny after death, as there must be  something unworldly in his present attitude to the life that now  is. (A. E. Taylor, The Christian Hope for Immortality, Macmillan 1947, p. 64, emphasis in original)

A. E. Taylor is no longer much read, but he is 'old school' in the depth of his erudition, unlike most contemporary academics, and is thus well-worth reading. In the passage quoted he makes a penetrating observation: the true Christian is not only unworldly in this world, but also unworldly in his expectations of the next.  This by contrast with one who is worldly in this world and desires his worldliness prolonged into the next.
 
Sinatra graveThe epitaph on Frank Sinatra's tombstone reads, "The best is yet to come." That may well be, but it won't be booze and broads, glitz and glamour, and the satisfaction of worldly ambitions that were frustrated this side of the grave. So the believer must sincerely ask himself: would I really want eternal life?
At funerals one sometimes hears pious claptrap about the dearly departed going off to be with the Lord. In many cases, this provokes a smile. Why should one who has spent his whole life on the make be eager to meet his Maker? Why the sudden interest in the Lord when, in the bloom of life, one gave him no thought? If you have loved the things of this world as if they were ultimate realities, then perhaps you ought to hope that death is annihilation.  Do you really desire direct contact with the divine Spirit? Why would you suddenly love there what you don't love here?

In any case, it is the puerile conception with which some mortalists and atheists want to saddle sophisticated theists. (A mortalist is not the same as an atheist, but most of the one are the other.) But is there a non-puerile, a sophisticated conception of the afterlife that a thinking man could embrace? The whole trick, of   course, is to work out a conception that is sophisticated but not unto utter vacuity. This is a hard task, and I am not quite up to it. But it is worth a try.

Our opponents want to saddle us with puerile conceptions: things on the order of irate lunar unicorns, celestial teapots, flying spaghetti monsters, God as cosmic candy man, and so on; but when we protest that that is not what we believe in, then they accuse us of believing in something vacuous. They would saddle us with a dilemma: you either embrace some unbelievable because crassly materialistic conception of God and the afterlife or you embrace nothing at all. I  explore this at length in Dennett on the Deformation of the God Concept.

Self-professed mortalist and former Jesuit Peter Heinegg writes, "It was and is impossible to conceive of an afterlife except as an improved version of this life (harps, houris, etc.), which doesn't  get one very far." (Mortalism, Prometheus 2003, p. 11) Granted, the harps-and-houris conception is a nonstarter. But is it really impossible to conceive, at least schematically, of an afterlife except as an improved version of this life?

Suppose that a bunch of young adolescents were to claim that it is  impossible to conceive of adulthood except as an improved version of adolescence. These boys and girls imagine adulthood to be adolescence but with the negative removed: no pimples, no powerlessness, no pestering parents, no pecuniary problems, no paucity of facial hair or mammary deficiency, etc. They simply cannot conceive of anything beyond the adolescent level. If you were to try to convince them that  their horizon is limited and that there is more to life than  adolescent concerns, you would not get through to them. For what they  need are not words and arguments; they need to grow up. The notion of growing up, though it entails persisting in time, is distinct from it:  it involves the further notion of maturation. They need to shed false beliefs and values and acquire true ones.

In this life, we adults are like adolescents: confused, unsure of what we really want, easily led astray. We have put away many childish  things only to lust after adult things, for example, so-called 'adult entertainment.' We don't read comic books; we read trashy novels. We don't watch cartoons; we watch The Sopranos and Sex in the City. We  are obviously in a bad state. In religious terms, our condition is  'fallen.' We are not the way we ought to be, and we know it. It is also clear that we lack the ability to help ourselves. We can make  minor improvements here and there, but our basic fallen condition  cannot be ameliorated by human effort whether individual or  collective.

These, I claim, are just facts. If you won't admit them,  then I suggest you lack moral discernment. (I am not however claiming  that eternal life is a fact: it is a matter of belief that goes beyond  what we can claim to know. It is not rationally provable, but I think  it can be shown to be rationally acceptable.)

Contrary to what Heinegg says is impossible, I am able, employing analogies such as  the foregoing, to conceive of a radical change that transforms us from  the wretched beings that we presently are into beings who are  genuinely and wholly good. (I concede, though, that conceivability is  no sure guide to real possibility; but the issue at the moment is  conceivability.) What is difficult and perhaps impossible is to conceive the details of how exactly this might come about. As I said,  it can't be achieved by our own effort alone. It requires a divine  initiative and our cooperation with it.

It won't occur in this life: I must pass beyond the portal of death, and I must somehow retain my personal identity through the passage.  Much will have to be sloughed off, perhaps most of what I now consider  integral to my selfhood. As noted, the transition is a transformation  and purification, not a mere prolongation. Will anything be left after this sloughing off? I suggest that unless one is a materialist, one  has reason to hope that the core of the self survives.

And this brings us back to what Schopenhauer called the 'world-knot,'  the mind-body problem. If materialism could be demonstrated, then the  foregoing speculations would be mere fancies. But materialism, though  it can be assumed, cannot be demonstrated: it faces insuperable  difficulties. The existence of these difficulties makes it reasonable  to entertain the hope of eternal life.

Beatific VisionBut if the afterlife is not Life 2.0  and is something like the visio beata  of Thomas Aquinas, wouldn't it be boring 'as hell'?  Well, it might well be hell for something who was looking forward to black-eyed virgins and a carnal paradise.  But suppose you are beyond the puerility of that view.  You want not sex but love, not power but knowledge, not fame but community, not excitement but peace and beatitude.  You want, finally, to be happy.

Would the happy vision be boring?  Well, when you were in love, was it boring?  When your love was requited, was it boring?  Was it not bliss?  Imagine that bliss ramped up to the maximum and made endless.  We tire of the finite, but the divine life is infinite.  Why then should participation in it be boring?  Or consider the self-sufficient bliss tasted from time to time here below by those of us capable of what Aristotle calls the bios theoretikos.  Were you bored in those moments?  Quite the opposite.    You were consumed with delight, happy and self-sufficient in the moment. Now imagine an endless process of intellectual discovery and contemplation.

What I am suggesting is that an afterlife worth wanting would be one, not of personal prolongation, but one of personal transformation and purification along lines barely conceivable to us here below.  God is just barely conceivable to us, and the same goes for our own souls.  So we ought to expect that the afterlife will be the same.  If we descry it at all from our present perspective, it is "through a glass darkly."

Is Greed the Engine of Capitalism?

I must have written this in 2004. It makes good on yesterday's promise to say more about why greed is not the origin of capitalism.

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The C-Span Washington Journal of 31 May 2004 with Steve Scully at the helm was particularly excellent.  One of the guests was a sweet old lady by the name of Mary Alice Herbert, the vice-presidential candidate of the Socialist Party USA in 2004.

She spouted a lot of nonsense, but the assertion that really got my blood up was the claim that, and I quote from my notes, "The engine of capitalism is greed." This is no better than saying that the engine of socialism is envy.

Greed (avarice) and envy are vices. A vice is a habit. Habits don't float in the air; they are dispositions of agents. A greedy person is one who is disposed toward inordinate acquisition, while an envious person is one who is disposed to feel diminished by the success or well-being of others to the extent of hating them for their success or well-being. Clearly, one can support, and participate in, a free market economy without being greedy. Anyone who is reading this post is most likely an example. Equally, one can support, and participate in, a socialist economy without being envious. Think of all the good Russians who really believed the Commie nonsense, made their selfless contributions, but ended up in the Gulag anyway, not to mention non-Russians who succumbed as well, Freda Utley being one example among many.

Winifred Utley (January 23, 1898 – January 21, 1978), commonly known as Freda Utley, was an English scholar, political activist and best-selling author. After visiting the Soviet Union in 1927 as a trade union activist, she joined the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1928. Later, married and living in Moscow, she quickly became disillusioned with communism. When her Russian husband, Arcadi Berdichevsky, was arrested in 1936, she escaped to England with her young son. (Her husband would die in 1938.)

In 1939, the rest of her family moved to the United States, where she became a leading anticommunist author and activist.[1] She became an American citizen in 1950. [2]

Greed is not what drives a free market economy; indeed, greed is positively harmful to such an economy. Take Enron. The greed of Jeffrey Skilling, Kenneth Lay, et al. led to the collapse of the company and to massive losses for the shareholders. Please don't confuse greed with acquisitiveness. A certain amount of acquisitiveness is reasonable and morally acceptable. Greed is inordinate acquisitiveness, where 'inordinate' carries not only a quantitative, but also a normative, connotation: the greedy person's acquisitiveness harms himself and others. Think of the miser, and the hoarder. What's more, greed cannot be measured by one's net worth. Bill Gate's net worth is in the billions. But he is not greedy as far as I can tell: he benefits millions and millions of people with his software, the employment and investment opportunities he provides, and the vast sums he donates to charities. 

C-Span viewers who called in to object to Herbert that socialism has failed everywhere it has been tried were met with the standard Marxist response, namely, that capitalist encirclement, capitalist opposition, is responsible for socialism's failure. This is an example of the classic double standard leftists employ. The problems of capitalism are blamed on capitalism, but the problems of socialism are ALSO blamed on capitalism. Another form of the double standard involves the comparison of capitalist reality, not with socialist reality, but with socialist ideality, socialist fiction, socialist utopia. A reality-to-reality comparison issues in an unfavorable judgment on socialism.

Finally, there is a problem with the sort of 'bottom up' or democratic socialism that people like Herbert espouse. This is supposed to avoid the problems attendant upon the sort of 'top down' socialism attempted in the Soviet Union. The latter required a revolutionary vanguard unequal in power to those on whom it sought to impose socialism — in obvious contradiction to the ultimate socialist desideratum of equality. Simply put, if equality is the end, the means cannot be dictatorship by the Party or by one man of steel. No entity, once it gains power, is likely to give it up. This is why Castro still rules his island paradise, forty six years after his 1959 ousting of Battista. [Remember, this was written in aught-four.] The will to power is the will to the preservation and expansion of power. 

Therefore, many socialists nowadays call themselves democratic socialists. But this smacks of a contradiction in terms. If socialism is to replace capitalism — as opposed to being confined to isolated pockets of society such as communes — then it must be imposed by force by a central authority. For there are just too many of us who cannot see why material (as opposed to formal) equality is even a value. 

Addendum 29 March 2019:

I've modified my view a bit. Then as now I hold that  there is nothing wrong with material inequality as such, assuming that it has arisen by just means and thus not by force and fraud, and that the worthy worst-off have the minimal needed.   But that strikes me now as logically consistent with saying that a reduction in material inequality would be a good thing.  X can be axiologically preferable to Y even if no one is under any moral obligation to bring about X over Y.

Inequality is a breeding ground for envy, an ugly thing indeed, and one of the Seven Deadly Sins to boot. But you would be morally obtuse if you thought that clamping down on the liberty that naturally issues in material inequality is a moral requisite.  Envy is a free choice of the morally benighted who practice the vice. Inequality may be conducive to the exercise of the vice, but nothing and no one forces anyone to be envious.

JUST OVER THE TRANSOM: THE SELECTED WORKS OF CESARE PAVESE

Whatever you say about Jeff Bezos & Co., Amazon's service is amazonianly amazing. I order a book. They promise delivery in two days. It arrives the next day. Would that happen in a socialist shit hole, Bernie? Could a company such as Amazon even get off the ground in such a politically feculent locale as Cuba? You and your ilk didn't build that, Obama.

There ought to be one nation on the face of the earth that celebrates the individual and his liberty. 'Diversity' demands it, don't you think?

Capitalism works. Socialism doesn't. Am I opposed to all government regulation? Of course not.

You say capitalism has its origin in greed? No more than socialism has its origin in envy. More on this topic later.

Enough Facebook for one day. I have done my daily bit in combating the Left and its destructive nonsense. Now it's your turn.

Do your bit. Speak out. Show some civil courage.

maverickphilosopher.typepad.com
 
Cesare Pavese, "Passion for Solitude"
Passion for Solitude BY CESARE PAVESE TRANSLATED BY GEOFFREY…

There is a Place for Polemic: A Characteristic Facebook Salvo

The trouble with people like 'Beto' the 'white Hispanic' blockhead, and Miss Occasional Cortex, is not just that they oppose the sound ideas that Dr. Hanson elucidates below, but that they could not even explain these ideas as a preliminary to a reasoned critique of them.

And another thing. There is a lot of leftist palaver these days about 'democratic norms' and their breaking by Trump & Co. But there is nothing 'democratic' about Deep State machinations aimed at removing from office a duly and DEMOCRATICALLY elected president.

And a lot of what these operatives call 'norms' are just their entrenched insidious practices. A practice does not get to become a norm just in virtue of its being normalized by elitist deep state careerists. What has become 'normal' may or may be normative. But one cannot expect this distinction to penetrate the shallow pates of the Democrat wannabes and their childish supporters. . . .

patriotpost.us
 
Proposed Voting Changes Are About Power, Not Principles
Progressive candidates and new Democratic representatives have offered…

Banning Guns and Banning Muslims

Conservatives are not opposed to gun control, but they strenuously oppose gun confiscation and proposals to ban civilian ownership of semi-automatic weapons. These include semi-auto handguns of .22 caliber,  semi-auto rifles such as the AR-15, and semi-auto shotguns. Most of these same conservatives, however, support a reduction of, or moratorium on, Muslim immigration, either across the board or from selected terror-sponsoring states.  

This raises a question. Is the differential stance of these conservatives reasonable?  According to Libertarian Michael Huemer,

The threat of mass shootings is vastly overblown. The U.S. murder rate is about 4.9 per 100,000 population per year. The comparable *mass shooting* death rate is about 0.002. We should stop freaking out about a relatively tiny risk.

He also maintains that

The threat of terrorism is vastly overblown. In the last 50 years or so, about 3,300 Americans were murdered by terrorists, while about 800,000 were murdered by non-terrorists. We should stop freaking out about a relatively tiny risk.

I will assume that Huemer's numbers are correct, at least  for Americans on American soil. The numbers seem about right. Going by the numbers alone, it is not rational for a random individual to worry about dying either in a mass shooting or in a terrorist attack.  So why the differential stance? is it not irrational for conservatives to support the right of civilians to own semi-auto weapons while wanting to reduce Muslim immigration out of concern that some Muslims will engage in terrorist attacks?

I say it is entirely rational to stand for gun rights while also demanding special vetting of Muslims and a reduction in Muslim immigration.  This is because immigrants bring their culture with them, and in the case of Muslims, their culture, based as it is on sharia, Islamic law, is antithetical to American values of the sort that libertarians and classical liberals tend to uphold.  These include freedom of thought and expression, even unto the mocking of their Prophet, religious liberty including the liberty to eschew religion, and separation of church/mosque and state.  Muslims, bringing their culture with them, are not interested in assimilating, but in remaking our culture in their image.  Taking advantage of our excessive tolerance, they seek to replace our tolerant culture with their intolerant culture.   

Libertarians, however, understand none of this since they tend to think in a narrowly economic way.  Blind to culture, libertarians are blind to the cultural damage that Muslims do by refusing to assimilate to American values and ways.  So they tally up how many are killed by berserk shooters and how many by berserk Muslims.  But that involves vicious abstraction. Once cannot reasonably abstract from the cultural impact of Muslim immigration.

When Americans stand for their Second Amendment rights, they are not altering American culture but insisting on it. Ours is a culture of liberty and self-reliance and limited government. It is a culture that prizes freedom of expression and open inquiry. It is anti-totalitarian in a way that theocratic Muslim culture is not.

Libertarians strike me as embarrassingly un-self-aware. They don't seem to realize that a culture in which they and their ideas can flourish is not a culture re-made along the lines of sharia.  For the sake of their own survival they need to realize that the threat that Muslim immigration poses is not merely the terrorist threat but the broader cultural threat.

The Media Have Damaged the Country Irreparably

David Harsanyi:

For the past two years, a large swath of the media engaged in a mass act of self-deception and partisan groupthink. Perhaps it was Watergate envy, or bitterness over Donald Trump’s victory, or antagonism towards Republicans in general—or, most likely, a little bit of all the above. But now that Special Counsel Robert Mueller has delivered his report on Russian collusion, it’s clear that political journalists did the bidding of those who wanted to delegitimize and overturn Trump’s election.

While bad behavior from partisan sources should be expected, the lack of skepticism from self-appointed unbiased journalists has been unprecedented. Any critical observer could see early on that Trump-era partisan newsroom culture had made journalists susceptible to the deception of those peddling expedient stories. Our weekly bouts of Russia hysteria all sprung from one predetermined outcome: the president was in bed with Vlad Putin.

Read it all.

Seriously Philosophical Theses and Argument Cancellation

Reader C. P. inquires,
Do you think that the arguments for and against every substantive philosophical thesis are equipollent [equal in force], or do you think only that we can never be certain about the truth of the theses? In some of your posts, you suggest that you think the former (e.g. here); but in others, you suggest that you think we can determine some theses as more likely true than others.  I'm fairly sure that you hold the former, but I thought I should make sure.
The question, as I would formulate it,  is whether every substantive philosophical thesis is such that the arguments for it and the arguments against it are equally plausible and thus 'cancel out,'  or whether some substantive philosophical theses are rationally preferable to their negations.  I begin by explaining my terminology.

D1. An argument for a thesis T cancels out an argument for the negation of T just in case both arguments are equally plausible, or not far from equally plausible, to the producers(s)/consumers(s) of the arguments, assuming that these individuals are 'competent practitioners.'

Plausibility is relative to an arguer and his audience, if any.  With respect to propositions, plausibility is not the same as truth.  A plausible proposition needn't be true, and a true proposition needn't be plausible. With respect to arguments, plausibility is neither validity nor soundness as these are standardly defined.  Validity and soundness are absolute, like truth herself. Plausibility is relative.   There cannot be sound arguments both for a thesis and its negation. For if there is a sound argument for T, then T is true. And if there is a sound argument for ~T, then ~T is true. This is logical fallout from the standard definition of 'sound' according to which a sound argument is one that is deductive, valid, and has only true premises.  If there are sound arguments for both a thesis T and its negation ~T, then (T & ~T) is true which violates the Law of Non-Contradiction.  Therefore, there cannot be sound arguments for a thesis and its negation.

So I am envisaging situations in which argument and counter-argument are equally plausible or nearly so but only one is sound.  Equally plausible to whom? It could be one and the same philosopher. Preston, for example, finds the arguments for and against a regularity theory of causation equally plausible. For him the arguments cancel out and he ends up in a state of doxastic equipoise with respect to the issue. From there he might go on to suspend judgment on the question, or he might investigate further.  A third option for one who ends up in doxastic equipoise is to leap to one side or the other.  Suppose, after canvassing the arguments for and against the existence of God, or those for and against the immortality of the soul, you find that the cumulative case for and the cumulative case against are equally plausible.  You might leap to one side for prudential or pragmatic reasons.  You would have no theoretical reason for the leap, but also no theoretical reason against the leap. But the leap might nonetheless be prudentially rational and the refusal to leap prudentially irrational. 

Or the plausibility could be to a group of philosophers.  Suppose the group has ten members, with five finding the arguments for more plausible than the arguments against, and five taking the opposite stance.  I will then say that argument and counter-argument are equally plausible to the group.  As I set up the example, none of the members of this group are in a state of doxastic equipoise. But I will make bold to claim that each of them ought to be, assuming that each of them is a competent practitioner. This claim is controversial, and needs defending, but I must move on. 

A competent practitioner is not the same as an epistemic peer.  A number of individuals may be epistemic peers, but all incompetent. I won't try for a crisp definition of 'competent practitioner,' but if one is a competent practitioner,  then he is a sincere truth seeker, not a quibbler or a sophist; he knows logic and the empirical disciplines that bear upon the arguments he is discussing; he is familiar with the relevant literature; he embodies the relevant intellectual virtues, and so on.

The answer to the reader's question will depend on what counts as a substantive or seriously philosophical thesis (SPT).  Such theses cannot be denials or affirmations of Moorean facts. Such a fact is roughly a deliverance of common sense. STPs are not at the level of data, but at the level of theory. The distinction between data and theory is not sharply drawn. Border disputes are possible. The theoretical bleeds into the datanic and vice versa. Theories are data-driven, but some data are theory-laden. But I don't believe one can get on without the data-theory distinction.

For example, it is a Moorean fact that some things no longer exist.  This cannot be reasonably disputed. Affirm the datum or deny it, you are not (yet) doing philosophy.  That Boston's Scollay Square no longer exists is not a philosophical claim, but a proto-philosophical or pre-analytic datum. But if you maintain that what no longer exists does not exist at all, then you go beyond the given to affirm a controversial philosophical thesis known as presentism.  Roughly, this is the thesis that, with respect to  items in time, only what exists at present exists, period.  (It implies that the Wholly No Longer and the Wholly Not Yet are realms of nonexistence.) This is hardly common sense despite what some presentists claim.  If Scollay Square is now nothing at all, then how could it be the object of veridical memories and the subject of true predications? A predicate cannot be true of an item unless the item exists.

If, on the other hand, you maintain that what no longer exists does exist, albeit tenselessly, then you are affirming a controversial philosophical thesis known in the trade as eternalism.  Eternalism will enable you  to explain how a wholly past item can be the object of veridical thoughts and the subject of true predications. But if you try to explain what 'tenseless' means in this context, you will soon entangle yourself in difficulties.  Both presentism and eternalism are examples of what I am calling seriously philosophical theses, they cannot both be true, and neither records a Moorean fact.

For a second example, consider the claim that consciousness is an illusion. This is not an SPT, despite its having been urged by philosophers of high repute.  It is either beneath refutation or is quickly refuted by a simple argument: illusions presuppose consciousness; ergo, consciousness is not an illusion.  There are any number of eliminativist claims that are not SPTs.   The claim that there are no claims, for example, 'sounds philosophical' but cannot be taken seriously: it is not an SPT.    On the other hand, there are eliminativist claims that are SPTs, for example, the claim that there is no such person as God, or that continuants such as tables and trees do not have temporal parts. 

In sum, if you affirm what is obvious or deny what is obvious you are not making a seriously philosophical claim even if what you affirm or deny is highly general and is apt to ignite philosophical controversy when brought into contact with other propositions. For example, if you affirm that some events are earlier than others, you simply a record a datum that no sane person can deny.  If, on the other hand, you affirm that everything that people believe is true then you affirm what is datanically false and no object of rational controversy. 

I consider all of the following examples of SPTs:

  • There are no nonexistent objects.
  • There are uninstantiated properties.
  • There are no modes of existence.
  • The properties of particulars are tropes, not universals.
  • God exists.
  • The soul is immortal.
  • The human will is libertarianly free.
  • Each of us is numerically identical to his living body.
  • I am not my living body; I merely have a living body.
  • Anima forma corporis.
  • Die Welt ist meine Vorstellung.
  • Laws of nature are just empirical regularities.
  • Truths need truth-makers.
  • Only facts could serve as truth-makers.
  • There are no facts.
  • Relations reduce to their monadic foundations.
  • There are no properties, only predicates.
  • The predicate 'true' serves only as a device for disquotation.
  • Social and economic inequalities are justified only if they benefit the worst-off.

There are many more examples, of course. Now what do the above  examples have in common? None of them records a Moorean fact. That is, none of them, if true,  is obviously true or datanically true.  Example.  There are two tomatoes on my counter, both ripe, and both (the same shade of) red.  That is a given, a datum, not subject to philosophical dispute, certain hyperbolic forms of skepticism aside.  But it is not a datum, phenomenological or otherwise, that the redness of the tomatoes is a universal, a repeatable entity, whether a transcendent universal (a one-over-many) or an immanent universal (a one-in-many).   For there is an alternative theory according to which the properties of particulars are themselves particulars (unrepeatables). On this theory each tomato has its own redness. Accordingly, there are two rednesses in the example, not one.  Both theories explain the data, but they cannot both be true. Phenomenology does not suffice to decide between them; dialectic must be brought in.  Once you get the dialectical ball rolling, you will have a hard time stopping it. It will roll down a rabbit hole that opens out into a labyrinth . . . .

Having clarified what I mean by a substantive or serious philosophical thesis, I now state two  meta-philosophical theses that I am considering. 

The strong thesis is that every SPT is such that the arguments for it and against it cancel out in the sense defined in (D1) above. This implies that no SPT is rationally preferable to its negation. I have my doubts about the strong thesis.

The weak thesis is that a proper subset of SPTs are such that the arguments for and against cancel out. I strongly suspect that the theses that most concern us belong to the proper subset, the hard core of insolubilia.

On the weak thesis, some SPTs will be theoretically-rationally preferable to others.

The Central Dividing Line in American Politics

The central dividing line, according to Samuel Huntington, is between cosmopolitanism and nationalism.  The former comes in two unpalatable flavors, neo-conservatism and cultural Marxism.

The neocon mistake was to imagine that our superior system of government could be imposed by force on  peoples riven by tribal hatreds who do not share our values and are depressed by an inferior religion. The folly of that should now be evident. One cannot bomb the benighted into Enlightenment.  Besides, our moral stock is at an all-time low.  Given our decadence and immorality how can we presume to teach Muslims how to live?

The mistake of the multi-culti cultural Marxists is to imagine that comity is possible without commonality, that wildly diverse sorts of people can live together in peace and harmony. Or at least that is one mistake of the politically correct multi-cultis.

Along comes Trump. Whatever you think of the man and his ostentation, self-absorption, slovenly speech, occasional feel-ups of members of the distaff contingent, and all the rest, he is a powerful vehicle of a necessary correction away from both forms of cosmopolitanism/globalism toward a saner view, a nationalist view. And, contrary to leftist slanders, there is nothing white or white supremacist about it.

Donald J. Trump is the somewhat unlikely vehicle of a necessary correction.  Without course correction the cliff is up ahead to be approached either by Donkey Express (Hillary and her ilk) or more slowly but just as surely by Elephant (Jeb! and colleagues). We should be grateful to Trump for having destroyed both the Clinton and Bush dynasties.

So how does the Left respond? In their usual vile and thoughtless way by the hurling of such epithets as sexist, Islamophobic, xenophobic, racist, fascist . . . you know the litany. According to Chris Mathews of MSNBC, Trump's inaugural speech was "Hitlerian."

The alacrity with which these leftist bums reach for the Hitler comparison shows the poverty of their 'thought.' 

Soteriology for Brutes?

Vito Caiati writes,

I have gone back and read your post “Are the Souls of Brute Animals Subsistent? Considerations Anent the Unity of Consciousness” many times since it first appeared in December of 2009.  In conclusion to the post, you write:
 
Thomas wants to say that men, but no brutes, have subsistent souls. This is because men, but no brutes, understand. But sensing is a form of consciousness, and consciousness cannot be understood in materialist terms. Sensing is not a mere collision of atoms in the void. Sensory consciousness, besides displaying unity across its several modalities, reveals qualia. And qualia are a well-known stumbling block to materialism. It is difficult to see why, if understanding supports the possibility of disembodied existence, sensing should not also support this possibility. There is after all only one soul which both senses and understands. The phrases “sensitive soul” and “intellective soul” are not to be taken to refer to distinct souls.
 
Assuming that you are correct, and I believe that you are, does it not follow that a broader Christian soteriology than that proffered by Aquinas and other scholastics should be open to discussion? For if the souls of animals are subsistent, might they too not survive death and be worthy of salvation of some kind, especially since they are free from the stain of sin?
 
I raise these questions as someone who has been profoundly troubled for many years by animal suffering from earliest times. I have always carried a sense that there is something rather too narrow in a doctrine of salvation that is restricted to mankind. I do not for a moment wish to conflate the ontological status of humans and animals, but is rationality a sufficient reason to exclude so many living, non-rational beings—especially the higher mammals–that have so often suffered terribly and died violently or in great pain to mere extinction?
 
RESPONSE
 
These are important questions about which I have little say at the moment.  But my friend Ed Feser weighs in in David Bentley Hart Jumps the Shark: Why Dogs Don't Go to Heaven.  It is delightfully polemical in the inimitable Feserian style as he takes on David Bentley Hart whose very name suggests a certain pomposity waiting to be punctured.   Now why does Feser think that cats and dogs do not survive their bodily deaths?

The reason is that non-human animals are entirely corporeal creatures, all matter and no spirit. To be sure, the matter of which they are composed is not the bloodlessly mechanical, mathematical Cartesian kind. Non-human animals are not machines; they really are conscious, really do feel pain and pleasure, really do show affection and anger. But these conscious states are nevertheless entirely dependent on bodily organs, as is everything else non-human animals do. Hence, when their bodies die, there is nothing left that might carry on into an afterlife. Fido’s death is thus the end of Fido.

If human beings were entirely corporeal creatures, the same would be true of us. But, the Thomist argues, human beings are not entirely corporeal. We are largely corporeal—as with Fido, our ability to take in nutrients, to grow and reproduce, to see, hear, imagine, and move about, depends on our having bodily organs. But our distinctively intellectual activities—our capacity to grasp abstract concepts, to reason logically, and so forth—are different. They could not be entirely corporeal.

[. . .]

If human beings do have, in addition to their bodily or corporeal activities, an activity that is essentially incorporeal—namely, intellectual activity or thought in the strict sense—then when the corporeal side of human nature is destroyed, it doesn’t follow that the human being as a whole is destroyed. There is an aspect to our nature—the intellect—that can carry on beyond the death of the body, precisely because even before death it was never entirely dependent on the body. This is why there is such a thing as an afterlife for human beings, as there is not for non-human animals.

Hart, like so many people these days, seems to have an excessively sentimental attachment to non-human animals. Perhaps he simply can’t imagine Heaven being a very happy place without a resurrected Fido to share it with.

Consider this. Christ tells us that there will not be marriage in Heaven, and the clear implication is that there will not be romance or sexual intercourse, either. Young people find it difficult to understand how we could fail to miss all of this, and anyone with an amorous disposition can sympathize. But, in fact, we will not miss it. That’s the thing about the beatific vision: it rather leaves everything else in its dust. And I submit that if you won’t miss sex when you’re in Heaven, it’s a safe bet that you’re not going to give much thought to Fido either.

Feser's answer in a nutshell is that non-human animals are all matter and no spirit; we, however, are matter and spirit. We are spiritual beings in virtue of our capacity for such intellectual activities as grasping concepts, forming judgments, and reasoning from the judgments formed.  Despite being wholly corporeal, non-human animals enjoy and suffer sentience: they are the subjects of conscious states, contra Descartes. Among these conscious states are non-intentional states such as pleasure and pain, but also, Feser seems to admit, intentional (object-directed) states such as affection and anger.  I have observed a cat expressing anger at another cat's behavior at the food bowl.  The one cat was not merely angry, but angry at something, the second cat's howling and 'acting up.'  So the first cat, a big maternal tabby bopped the little noisy cat on the head with her paw.  What we have in this example, I think, is intentionality together with a primitive conceptualization of the second cat's behavior as 'offensive' or 'inappropriate'  and not just 'kitty kat kwalia.'
 
Does this prove that cats are in some measure 'intellectual' and thus not wholly corporeal? Of course not. But it gives us a reason to doubt the hard-and-fast Thomist distinction between non-human and human animals. Vito Caiati quoted me as saying, "It is difficult to see why, if understanding supports the possibility of disembodied existence, sensing should not also support this possibility." I did not properly expand upon this thought at the time, so I will add something now. Suppose the sensing is not just a qualitative state but an intentional state, a sensing that, a sensing that the cat treats in the bowl are stale, for example.  The cat cannot articulate the content of his sensing in an explicit judgment either in thought or in language, but it seems reasonable to ascribe a proto-propositional content to the cat's consciousness.
 
There are also considerations anent the unity of consciousness that tend to blur the distinction between non-human and human animal minds.  After a cat has defecated, he sees where the scat is which he then 'decides' to bury or not, and then smells whether he has buried it sufficiently, a smelling which involves intentionality and something like judgment.  It is something like what I do when I smell a shirt to see if it is too stinky to wear in public. At the same time the cat is listening to the circumambient noise. If it is normal, he continues his job; if not he breaks it off, and jumps out of the box.   What we have here is a unity of consciousness in the synthesis of a manifold of representations, to employ some Kantian jargon: a unity of seeing, smelling, and hearing.  This unity is arguably of a spiritual, non-corporeal, nature since it cannot be located in any part of the cat's body or brain.
 
My interim conclusion is that Feser is not obviously right as against Hart, and that the question remains open.  It has not been definitively shown that such critters as cats cannot survive their bodily deaths.  If they do, and there is a sort of salvation for them, then this would amount to a sort of redemption of the horror of animal existence in a fallen world in which nature is red in tooth and claw and animals eat each other alive.
 
Feser makes a good point, however, when he says that the Beatific Vision will so entrance those of us who get to enjoy it that we will give no thought to our sublunary animal companions. But this is consistent both with their survival and with their non-survival of their bodily deaths. Perhaps my cats will go to cat heaven where they will be compensated for their suffering here below, and I will be so swept up into the Visio Beata as to give them no thought at all, any more than I will give any thought to that Gibson ES 335 that I never should have sold.

On ‘Illegal Alien’ and ‘Illegal Immigrant’

Liberals, whose love of political correctness gets the better of their intellects, typically object to the phrase 'illegal alien.' But why? Are these people not in our country illegally, as the result of breaking laws?  And are they not aliens, people from another country? 

"But you are labeling them!"  Yes, of course.  Label we must if we are not to lose our minds entirely. 'Feral cat' is a label.  Do you propose that we not distinguish between feral and non-feral cats?  Do you distinguish between the positive and the negative terminals on your car battery?  You'd better!  But 'positive terminal' and 'negative terminal' are labels. 

Label we must.  There is no getting around it if we are to think at all.  There is a political outfit that calls itself "No Labels."  But that too is a label.  Those who eschew all labels label themselves 'idiots.'

Related to this is the injunction, 'Never generalize!' which is itself a generalization. Label we must and generalize we must.  Making distinctions and labeling them, and constructing sound generalizations on their basis are activities essential to, thought not exhaustive of, the life of the intellect.

Liberals also object to 'illegal immigrant.'  In fact, the AP has banned the phrase.  But given that there are both legal and illegal immigrants, 'illegal immigrant' is a useful label.  There is nothing derogatory about it.  It is a descriptive term like 'hypertensive' or 'diabetic.' 

One consideration adduced at the AP site is that actions are illegal, not persons. But suppose your doctor tells you that you are diabetic, and you protest, "Doc, not only are you labelling me, you are forgetting that diabetes is a medical condition and that no person is a medical condition." The good doctor would then have to explain that a diabetic is a person who has diabetes.  Similarly, an illegal immigrant is one who is in the country illegally.  There is the act of illegally crossing the border, but there is also the state of being here illegally.

Plain talk is an excellent antidote to liberal nonsense. When a liberal or a leftist misuses a word in an intellectually dishonest attempt at forwarding his agenda, a right-thinking person ought to protest.  Whether you protest or not, you must not acquiesce  in their pernicious misuse of language.  Or, as I have said more than once in these pages,

If you are a conservative, don't talk like a liberal!

Bear in mind that many of the battles of the culture war are fought, won, and lost on linguistic ground. If we let  our opponents destroy the common language in which alone reasonable  debate can be conducted, then much more is lost than these particular  debates.  The liberal-left misuse of language is fueled by their determination to win politically at all costs and by any means, including linguistic hijacking.

Language matters!