Month: September 2022

A Common Mistake in the Abortion Discussion

It is often said that a human fetus is a potential human life. Not so! A human fetus is an actual human life.
 
Consider a third-trimester human fetus, alive and well, developing in the normal way in the mother. It is potentially many things: a neonate, a two-year-old, a speaker of some language, an adolescent, an adult, a corpse. And let's be clear that a potential X is not an X. A potential oak tree is not an oak tree. A potential neonate is not a neonate. A potential speaker of Turkish is not a Turkish speaker. But an acorn, though only potentially an oak tree, is an actual acorn, not a potential acorn. And its potentialities are actually possessed by it, not potentially possessed by it.
 
The typical human fetus is an actual, living, human biological individual that actually possesses various potentialities. So if you accept that there is a general, albeit not exceptionless, prohibition against the taking of innocent human life, then you need to explain why you think a third-trimester fetus does not fall under this prohibition. You need to find a morally relevant difference — not just any old difference, but a difference that makes a moral difference — between the fetus and any born human individual.

The Affinity of Philosophy and Madness: David Stove on the Logos

From an interview with a philosopher of madness who is also a mad philosopher in the sense that he has experienced severe psychotic episodes requiring hospitalization,  Wouter Kusters:

JB: So, to paraphrase again, the ‘mad person’ is grappling with the very same profound questions as the philosopher, but is doing so in more chaotic, ‘uncontained’ and perhaps, as a result, confusing way. The content — i.e., preoccupations with philosophical, spiritual, religious matters common in those so diagnosed — is not a ‘symptom’ of a disease process but indicative of a radical immersion in these immense conundrums of existence. I also take you to be saying that the mad person may have gone a little too far into this and has entered a sort of philosophical freefall. The key difference between the mad person and the philosopher, then, is not one of biology or pathology, but of the context and container in which this exploration is taking place. Is that right? 

WK: Yes, that is absolutely right. But with this caveat: it could also be argued that both philosophy and madness are themselves symptoms of a disease process, the logical outcome of our endowment, since prehistory, with a consciousness that can reflect on its own emptiness. But the key difference between the mad person and philosopher still lies where you place it, yes. 

As a philosophical maverick, I am neither analytic nor Continental, but someone who,  conversant in both idioms, has published in both types of journals. I chop logic and engage in close analysis and argumentation, but I am also no stranger to such existential moods as Heideggerian Angst, Sartean nausée, and Camusian absurdité. Not only have I had these feelings, I am also open to their possibly revelatory value as disclosing deep truths about our predicament in this life. I am  thus  interested in the question of the relation of philosophy to topics the 'well-adjusted' are apt to consider border-line mad or 'pathological' and thus of no objective significance.  What follows is something I wrote years ago about and against the spiritually superficial Australian positivist David Stove who has no sympathy whatsoever for the mad and mystical depths of genuine philosophy.  What I wrote is perhaps too polemical. But I persist in my conviction that Stove was a deeply superficial fellow, a philosophistine, a term I will define below. 

……………………………..

Commenting on philosophy's alleged "deep affinity with lunacy," Australian positivist David Stove writes,

That the world is, or embodies, or is ruled by, or was created by, a sentence-like entity, a ‘logos’, is an idea almost as old as Western philosophy itself. Where the Bible says ‘The Word was made flesh’, biblical scholars safely conclude at once that some philosopher [Stove’s emphasis] has meddled with the text (and not so as to improve it). Talking-To-Itself is what Hegel thought the universe is doing, or rather, is. In my own hearing, Professor John Anderson maintained, while awake, what with G. E. Moore was no more than a nightmare he once had, that tables and chairs and all the rest are propositions. So it has always gone on. In fact St John’s Gospel, when it says ’In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God’, sums up pretty accurately one of the most perennial, as well as most lunatic, strands in philosophy. (The passage is also of interest as proving that two statements can be consistent without either being intelligible.) (From The Plato Cult and Other Philosophical Follies, Basil Blackwell 1991, p. 32.)

A few comments are in order.

1. Let’s start with the parenthetical claim at the end. To say that two statements are (logically) consistent is to say that they (logically) can both be true, that there is a (logically) possible world in which both are true. But a statement cannot be true or false unless it possesses meaning: meaningfulness is a necessary (though not a sufficient) condition of having a truth-value. Now to be meaningful and to be intelligible are the same. It follows that Stove is wrong and that it is not the case that two statements can be consistent without either being intelligible. Consistency is defined in terms of truth, and truth requires intelligibility.

2. Are The Word was with God and The Word was God, taken singly, unintelligible? Not unless you are a positivist who ties intelligibility to empirical verifiability. But the principle of cognitive significance that positivists employ (according to which every cognitively meaningful statement is either logical/analytic or else empirically verifiable in principle) is itself empirically unverifiable. And since it is neither a truth of logic nor an analytic truth or logical truth, it is itself meaningless by its own criterion. Stove is hoist by his own petard, or cooked by his own stove.

3. To say or imply that no concrete thing in the world could have a proposition-like structure, and that anyone who thinks this is a lunatic, is itself a lunatic thing to say. I maintain that the world’s basic particulars are concrete facts and thus have a proposition-like structure, and I am no lunatic. (See my A Paradigm Theory of Existence, Kluwer 2002). Closer to Australia, atheist David Armstrong, no slouch of a philosopher, and sane as far as I can tell, argues, quite sensibly, that contingent truths require truth-makers and that the latter are states of affairs, proposition-like entities. Stove’s suggestion that a view like this is insane shows that there is something deeply wrong with Stove. 'I am seated’ is true in virtue of the fact of my being seated. My being seated is a proposition-like entitiy. Insanity? Or common sense?

4. The trouble with Stove is that he is a positivist, an anti-philosopher, someone with no inkling of what philosophy is about. He is very intelligent in a superficial sort of way, witty, erudite, a pleasure to read, and I am sure it would have been great fun to have a beer with him. But he is what I call a philosophistine. A philistine is someone with no appreciation of the fine arts; a philosophistine is one with no appreciation of philosophy. People like Stove and Paul Edwards and Rudolf Carnap just lack the faculty for philosophy, a faculty that is distinct from logical acumen.

5. My tone is harsh.  What justifies it?  The even harsher tone this two-bit positivist assumes in discussing great philosophers who will be read long after he is forgotten, great philosophers he must misunderstand because he cannot attain their level. 

For more on Kusters, I refer you to the NDPR review of his book, A Philosophy of Madness: The Experience of Psychotic Thinking, Nancy Forest-Flier (trans.), MIT Press, 2020, 738pp., $39.95, ISBN 9780262044288.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: September Songs

September's on the wane.  A transitional month leading from hot August to glorious October, Kerouac month in the MavPhil 'secular 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

And while we have Miss King cued up, lend an ear to One Fine Day.

The 'sixties forever! We were young, raw, open, impressionable, experience-hungry; we lived intensely and sometimes foolishly.  We felt deeply, and suffered deeply. Youth has its truth. And our popular music put to shame the crap that came before and after. Or so we thought. And so we still think. Would I want to live though the 'sixties again? Hell no, I am having too good a time enjoying it memorially at a safe distance.  Youth has its truth, but if you can make it into old age with health and intellect intact, and a modicum of the lean green, you are winning the game. 

Django Reinhardt, September Song

George Shearing, September in the Rain

Walter Huston, September Song 

Van Morrison, September Night

Brothers Four, Try to Remember. I do remember when I was "a tender and callow fellow." 

Billie Holliday, September Song

Addendum

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.’  Great alto voice, never made it in the US as far as I know. There is an  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.  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.

Downplay Both

If you downplay your wins, downplay your losses. The pain of defeat is worse than the pleasure of victory is good. But you have the power  to regard them as equal. In some measure the pain of loss can be lessened. The Stoic therapy is no cure, but it is a palliative. If our predicament is a splitting headache, said therapy is a couple of aspirin. Take it and them for what they are worth.

With Detachment from the Outcome

There are games and there is life, and life is not a game. But life is like a game, and sufficiently so to warrant application of the same principle: play hard, but with detachment from the outcome.

In chess, and not just in chess, it is 'unsporting' not to try to defeat the opponent by all legal means.  It shows a lack of respect for the opponent and for the game to not do one's best. 

In life as in chess, play hard, but with detachment from the outcome.

If the above reminds you of the Bhagavad Gita, that's a feather in your cap.

Related: Coitus Reservatus and Beyond

Crime and ‘Equity’

On Biden's watch, crime is surging. It is easy to see why. For the 'woke' Left, the achieving of 'equity' is a high if not the highest desideratum. 'Equity' is wokespeak for equality of outcome. To achieve 'equity' in apprehension, prosecution, sentencing, and incarceration of blacks as compared to whites, given the much greater criminality of blacks as compared to whites and Asians, certain 'reforms' have to be made, including the elimination of cash bail. Standards have to be lowered to the point where blacks become the equals of whites and Asians with respect to such outcomes as apprehension, prosecution, sentencing, incarceration, and the like. The lowering of standards naturally brings more crime of all sorts.
 
If you believe that the upsurge of crime is a price that has to be paid to achieve the lofty goal of 'equity,' then I recommend that you continue to vote Democrat.