Month: November 2022

Sunday Morning Sermon: A Life Well Lived

To make good use of your time in this world, think of your life above all as a quest, a seeking, a searching, a striving.  For what?  For the ultimate in reality, truth, value, and for their existential appropriation.  

One appropriates reality by being authentic, truth by being truthful, values and norms by living them.  

It may all be absurd in the end, a "tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."  But one cannot live well on the assumption that it is.

So assume that it is not and seek the truth along all avenues of advance.

A Contemplative Nun on Thomas Merton

This just over the transom from Karl White:

Hope you're well. May be of interest.

Hi Karl,

Your message arrives at an opportune moment. The day before yesterday I received Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, Christian Perfection and Contemplation: According to St. Thomas Aquinas and St. John of the Cross. Garrigou-Lagrange's work is the real deal from perhaps the hardest of the hard-core paleo-Thomists.
 
While reading the chapter on infused contemplation, I thought of Thomas Merton. Merton's sense of the reality of the Unseen Order was weak and underdeveloped because of the strong lure of the secular — to which, however, he never entirely succumbed, pace the thesis of David D. Cooper's excellent but mistaken Thomas Merton's Art of Denial: The Evolution of a Radical Humanist (University of Georgia Press, 1989, 2008).  Cooper attributed the evolution (devolution?) to Merton's failure to achieve infused contemplation. As I read him, however, Merton never lost his faith. He did, however, remain to the end deeply conflicted. All the Merton commentators that I have read agree that he came to question the contemptus mundi he expressed in The Seven Storey Mountain.  As for whether or not Merton attained infused contemplation, if he had why are there no references to it in his journal? There is a paucity of spiritual disclosure in those private pages of a monk who one would think would reveal the most intimate secrets of his inner life. I have read all seven volumes of his journal several times over. He is one of those key figures without whom you cannot understand the 'Sixties.
 
Thanks for the link.  I read the Ellsberg-Sr. Wendy correspondence with interest.
 
Regards,
 
Bill

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Rock and Roll Apologetics

A curious sub-genre of meta-rock devoted to the defense of the devil's music.

The Showmen, It Will Stand, 1961 

Bob Seger, Old-Time Rock and Roll

But does it really "soothe the soul"? Is it supposed to?  For soul-soothing, I recommend the Adagio movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. Adagio molto e cantabile.

Rolling Stones, It's Only Rock and Roll (but I Like It)

Electric Light Orchestra, Roll Over, Beethoven.  Amazingly good.  Roll over, Chuck Berry!

Danny and the Juniors, Rock and Roll is Here to Stay

Chuck Berry and Friends, Rock and Roll Music

Off-topic bonus cut:  The Chantels, Look in My Eyes, 1961.  YouTuber comment: "Emanating from the Heart Chakra. Something pop songs rarely do anymore. Feel it?" The popular music of this period had human meaning, coming from the heart and speaking to the heart, even when it passed over into schmaltz and sentimentality.

Against H. A. Prichard and the ‘Standard Picture’ of Kant

 In an earlier post, drawing on the work of Henry E. Allison, I wrote:

The standard picture opens Kant to the devastating objection that by limiting knowledge to appearances construed as mental contents he makes knowledge impossible when his stated aim is to justify the objective knowledge of nature and oppose Humean skepticism. Allison reports that Prichard "construes Kant's distinction between appearances and things in themselves in terms of the classic example of perceptual illusion: the straight stick that appears bent to an observer when it is immersed in water." (p. 6)  But then knowledge is rendered impossible, and Kant is reduced to absurdity.

Anyone who studies Kant in depth and in context and with an open mind should be able to see that his transcendental idealism is not intended as a subjective idealism. A related mistake is to think that subjective idealism is the only kind of idealism. The "standard picture" is fundamentally mistaken. Appearances (Erscheinungen) for Kant are not the private data of particular minds, and thus not ideas in the Cartesian-Lockean sense, or any other sort of content of a particular mind. Kant distinguishes crucially between Erscheinung and Schein/Apparenz between appearance and illusion/semblance. Because of this distinction, appearances [in the specifically Kantian sense] cannot be assimilated to perceptual illusions in the way Prichard and the "standard picture" try to assimilate them. 

In this entry I will expand upon the above by taking a close look at the stretch of text in H.A. Prichard's Kant's Theory of Knowledge (1909) in which he discusses the straight stick that appears bent when immersed in water.  This is a classical example of perceptual illusion.  It illustrates how an appearance (in one sense of the term) may distort reality (in one sense of the term).  Call the first the A1 sense and the second the R1 sense. My claim, of course, is that this empirical A1-R1 distinction is not the same as Kant's distinction between phenomena and things in themselves, and that anyone who, like Prichard, thinks otherwise has simply failed to understand what Kant is maintaining.  Kant's distinction between phenomena and things in themselves is the distinction between empirically real, intersubjectively accessible, public, causally interacting things in space and time, on the one hand, and those same things considered apart from the a priori conditions of our sensibility.  The Earth and its one natural satellite, the Moon, are examples of phenomena in Kant's sense.  Neither is a private, mental item in a particular mind as a modification of such a mind or an item internal to it. The Earth and the Moon are not mental phenomena in any Cartesian, Humean, or Brentanian sense, but empirically real, physical things. But though they are empirically real, they are transcendentally ideal when considered independently of the conditions of our sensibility.

In sum, there are two distinctions. The first is the distinction between private mental contents of particular minds and real things external to such minds. For example, Ed is enjoying a visual experience of his by-now-famous desk.  Neither the desk as a whole nor any part of it is literally in Ed's mind, let alone in his head. The desk, like his head and the rest of his body, is in the publicly accessible external world.  Now let 'A1' denote Ed's experience/experiencing whereby his desk appears to him, and let 'R1' denote the desk itself which is external to Ed's mind/consciousness. Prichard's mistake is to conflate this A1-R1 distinction with Kant's distinction between phenomena and things in themselves. The R1 of the first distinction is the A2 of Kant's distinction which, again, is the distinction between intersubjectively accessible objects in space and time and those same objects viewed independently of the conditions of our sensibility.

I now turn to Chapter IV of Prichard's book. The chapter is entitled "Phenomena and Things in Themselves."  Prichard takes Kant to be saying that spatial and temporal relations are "relations which belong to things only as perceived." (p. 79.)  Prichard goes on to say, "The thought of a property or a relation that belongs to things as perceived involves a contradiction."  He brings up the submerged stick which is in reality straight, but appears to a perceiver as bent. Prichard then makes the unexceptionable point that 

. . . the assertion that something is so and so implies that it is so and so in itself, whether it be perceived or not, and therefore the assertion that something is so and so to us as perceiving, though not in itself, is a contradiction in terms. 

This is certainly true. After I explain why it is true, I will explain why it has nothing to do with Kant.  One cannot assert of anything x that it is F without thereby asserting that x is F in reality.  What one asserts to be the case one asserts to be the case whether or not anyone asserts it.  (Of course, it doesn't follow that what one asserts to be the case is the case. All that follows is that what one asserts to be the case purports to be the case independently of anyone's act of assertion.  Saying this I am merely unpacking the concept of assertion.) So if I assert of x that it is bent, then I assert that x is bent in itself or in reality whether or not there are any assertors or perceivers.  To assert that x is bent is to assert that a mind-independent item is bent. (Of course, it does not follow that there is a mind-independent item that is bent; all that follows is that if some item is bent or straight or has any property, then it is mind-independent.) Therefore, if I assert of an illusory appearance that it is bent, then I fall into contradiction. For what I am then asserting  is that something that is mind-dependent — because it is illusory — is not mind-dependent but exists in reality. 

This is what I take Prichard to be maintaining in the passage quoted. Thus charitably interpreted, what he is saying is (by my lights) true.  But what does this have to do with Kant? Kant is not not talking about private mental items internal to particular minds such as an illusory appearance as of a bent stick. He is not saying of such an appearance (Apparenz) or semblance (Schein) that it is the subject of spatial and temporal relations.  If he were, then he would stand refuted by Prichard's unexceptionable point. But it strains credulity to think that a great philosopher could blunder so badly. 

Note also that to read Kant as if his phenomena (Erscheinungen) in space and time are private mental phenomena is to impute to him the sophomoric absurdity that mental data which are unextended are extended as they must be if they stand in physical relations. Such an imputation would be exegetically uncharitable in excelsis.

Finally, if space and time and everything in it is mental in Prichard's sense, and internal to particular minds like ours, then the upshot would be an utterly absurd form of subjective idealism. 

…………………………………….

Further tangential ruminations.

How do I know that the visual datum is an illusory appearance? If I know that what appears to me — the immersed-stick visual datum — is illusory, then I know that what appears to me cannot be bent or straight or have any spatial property. For what is illusory does not exist, and what does not exist cannot have properties. But how do I know that the visual datum does not exist?

That is precisely what I don't know in the cases of perceptual illusion in which I am really fooled — unlike the classic stick case above that fools no adult. No adult is 'taken in' by acquatic refraction phenomena. "Damn that boatman! He gave me a bent oar!"  Here is a real-life example.

Crotalus atroxHiking in twilight, I experience a visual datum as of a rattlesnake. I jump back and say to my partner, "There's a rattler on the trail."  I assert the visual datum to be a rattler, which of course implies that in reality there is a rattler.  (And that I jumped back shows that my assertion was sincere.) A closer look, however, shows that I mistook a tree root for a snake. What I initially saw (in the phenomenological sense of 'see') was only an illusory appearance. If I then say that the illusory appearance is a rattler or is venomous, etc. then I fall into contradiction. The point is that illusory appearances do not exist and therefore cannot have properties: they cannot be bent or straight or venomous or of the species crotalus atrox, etc.

 

David Benatar on Epistemic Injustice

An excerpt from The Uphill Battle of Unpopular Ideas:

Regarding epistemic matters, many of those who identify themselves as progressives speak about “epistemic injustice” – the injustice that occurs when certain people, typically women and darker skinned people, are accorded less standing or authority as knowers or transmitters of knowledge. This is a profound and important concept.
 
The problem is that progressives have missed a key, but obvious, dimension to epistemic injustice. The more somebody is actually the victim of epistemic injustice, the less likely and less widely they are to be recognized as such. Indeed, the absence of that recognition is precisely what feeds the epistemic injustice. Not only are you not taken as seriously as you should be, but it is not widely recognized that this is the case.
 
The corollary is that the more widespread the recognition of a particular manifestation of epistemic injustice is, the less likely it is that the purported victim actually is a victim. This is not a logical point but rather a psychological one. It is logically possible for X, Y, and Z to recognize that W is the victim of epistemic injustice while continuing to take W less seriously than W should be taken. Psychologically, however, those who regard W as a victim of epistemic injustice are more likely not to inflict that injustice themselves, either because they are sensitive to the potential problem or because they compensate (and not infrequently overcompensate) for it.
 
One upshot of this is that while those espousing orthodox views are likely to be given more credence, even when the orthodox views are flawed, those expressing unpopular but well-founded views are likely to be given less credence than they should be given. That is a stark form of epistemic injustice – and one typically not recognized by those who are concerned about epistemic injustice.
 
Even mentioning this comes at a risk. This is because there are orthodox views about who the victims of epistemic injustice are – and they do not include those who hold unorthodox views (for example, about epistemic injustice). Everybody can agree that it is unseemly to claim epistemic injustice when it does not exist. However, the difference between orthodox and unorthodox views about when this applies is that the orthodox views are, by definition, dominant. The point of this observation is not to elicit sympathy, but to articulate the ironies and paradoxes.

Guest Post: Buckner on Prichard on Kant

PRICHARD ON KANT: IN DEFENCE OF THE ANGLOSPHERE

D.E. Buckner

Bill Vallicella discusses here the ‘standard picture’ of Kant ’s transcendental idealism as a theory that affirms the unknowability of the ‘real’ (things in themselves) and relegates knowledge to the purely subjective realm of representations (appearances), adding that “P. F. Strawson and H. A. Prichard are exponents of this reading along with many others in the Anglosphere”. He argues that “Appearances (Erscheinungen) for Kant are not the private data of particular minds, and thus not ideas in the Cartesian-Lockean sense, or any other sort of content of a particular mind. Kant distinguishes crucially between Erscheinung and Schein/Apparenz: between appearance and illusion/semblance.” He develops this theme in another post here, in the context of Kant’s ‘rainbow argument’ (A45/B63).

 

Bill does not explain the Anglospheric reading. In this post, I shall outline Prichard’s objection to the rainbow argument, as set out in Kant’s Theory of Knowledge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1909, pp. 94 ff). He objects, in effect, that the rainbow argument is an argument by analogy. Just as a rainbow is to the raindrops which create the illusion of a rainbow during a sunny shower, i.e. as appearance stands in relation to reality, so the raindrops are to the ‘things in themselves’. “Not only are the raindrops mere appearances, but even their circular form, nay, even the space in which they fall, are nothing in themselves but mere modifications or fundamental dispositions of our sensuous perception; the transcendental object [i.e. the thing in itself], however, remains unknown to us” (B62-3)." My emphasis.

 

But the analogy is a poor one. Prichard says (p.97) that we can only distinguish something as the thing in itself from an appearance, “so long as we mean by the thing in itself what Kant normally means by it, viz. something which exists independently of perception and is not an appearance at all.” I.e., the relation between rainbow and raindrops is not analogous to that between raindrops and things in themselves, because ‘thing in itself’ signifies something absolute and not relative, namely what the scholastics called a per se being, a thing that exists independently of any other thing, and particularly of any sentient thing. If a raindrop really is a per se being, then it exists independently of any other such being, so cannot be an appearance of something. If on the other hand it is not a per se being, then the analogy collapses: we cannot say that just as a rainbow stands to raindrops, so raindrops stand to raindrops-in-themselves.

 

Kant’s argument thus depends on a sleight of hand. “He reaches it by a transition which at first sight seems harmless … while he states the problem in the form ‘Are things in themselves spatial or are they only spatial as appearing to us?’ he usually states the conclusion in the form ‘Space is the form of phenomena’, i. e. phenomena are spatial. A transition is thereby implied from ‘things as appearing’ to ‘appearances’” (pp. 73-4).

 

Underlying the mistake, says Prichard, is the identification of perception with judgement. Our apprehension of what things are is essentially a matter of thought or judgement, and not of perception. “We do not perceive but think a thing as it is”. For example, the proposition “the portion of the great circle joining two points on the surface of a sphere is the shortest way between them via the surface” expresses a judgment that is valid for everyone.

 

Kant, however, treats the judgement as a perception; for if we apply his general assertion to this instance, we find him saying that what we judge the portion of the great circle to be essentially belongs to the perception of it, and is valid for the sensuous faculty of every  human being, and that thereby it can be distinguished from what belongs to the same perception of a great circle accidentally, e. g. its apparent colour, which is valid only for a particular organization of this or that sense. In this way he correlates what the great circle really is, as well as what it looks, with perception, and so is able to speak of what it is for perception. But, in fact, what the great circle is, is correlated with thought, and not with perception; and if we raise Kant’s transcendental problem in reference not to perception but to thought, it cannot be solved in Kant’s agnostic manner. For it is a presupposition of thinking that things are in themselves [my emphasis] what we think them to be; and from the nature of the case a presupposition of thinking not only cannot be rightly questioned, but cannot be questioned at all.

 

Simply put, a proposition is true or false depending on whether it agrees with reality or not.

 

As I shall argue elsewhere, this ‘Anglospheric’ point by Prichard marks a turning point in the philosophy of perception, indeed in philosophy itself. For nearly 300 years, beginning with the discovery of Descartes and others that the process of vision begins with the retinal image, the focus of philosophy was on perception, i.e. images, and not on language. Indeed, it is hard to find any informed linguistic analysis in the writing of Descartes, Locke, Berkeley, Kant and other. Church regarded Hegel’s Logic as marking the very lowest point of the history of logic. In the twentieth century Anglosphere, by contrast, the philosophy of perception is marked by a ‘linguistic turn’ to focus on language and philosophical logic. But that is a separate issue, as is the question of why philosophy on the Continent, much or all of it in the tradition that originates with Brentano and Husserl, took such a different turn.

 

MaverickPhilo@Twitter

Here I am. Pay me a visit. I don't quite know the ropes yet.

Who will be Facebook's Elon Musk? Hats off to the latter. Middle finger to the former. Without free speech, republics collapse. Our republic is collapsing and there may be no stopping the slide into the abyss; but as the saying goes, 'it ain't over 'til it's over.' We fight on.

Brandon on Nemes on Orthodoxy and Heresy

Just over the transom from Steven Nemes:

My book, Orthodoxy and Heresy, was recently published in the Cambridge Elements series by Cambridge University Press.
 
Brandon of the Siris blog recently wrote a post responding to it with an objection. I have also replied to his objection in the comments. You might be interested.
I remember Brandon from the early days of the blogosphere which we both entered in 2004.  The first weblogs began to appear circa 2000, and by 2003-4 the 'sphere was in high gear. By 2010 or so it was considered by many to be pas​sé what with the migration of cyber-bullshitters to Twitter, Facebook, etc. leaving the 'sphere to serious content producers. Siris is a seriously good blog.
 
Blogging, like Rock and Roll, is here to stay. 

Tulsi Gabbard on the Second Amendment

Tulsi Gabbard is quite the political phenomenon: personable, very intelligent, courageous, and sensible in her views. Here she explains how her views on 2A have changed and indeed improved. 

Around 9:25 Gabbard quotes from the recently-imploded ACLU: "Racism is foundational to the Second Amendment."  That's just insane for so many reasons. I'll leave it to you to work out why. Or else just listen to Tulsi's commentary.

Fetterman Unfettered: Against Ableism

In the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, John Fetterman is currently competing with Dr. Mehmet Oz for a seat in the U. S. Senate. Any objective person who observes both men in action can see that Fetterman is mentally, morally, and politically unfit for office.  (I won't comment on the 'hoodie,' the ugly forearm tattoos, the neck bulge, the man's lack of a career outside of politics, or his 'anti-gravitas': the man's overall thuggish appearance.)

Mentally, he has trouble formulating clear sentences.  A recent stroke has left him impaired. Morally, he is a brazen liar: he recently stated in a debate with Dr. Oz that he supports fracking when it is obvious from his previous assertions and his overall position that he does not. Politically, he supports destructive hard-Left positions with respect to drugs and crime and everything else.

But let's say you believe in 'equity' as wokesters use the word. You believe in equality of outcome and proportional representation regardless of merit and qualifications.  If 'equity' is your concern why shouldn't a stroke-impaired man be a U. S. senator? After all, if dementia is no bar to high office, why should stroke-impairment be?  Fetterman's fit with the Biden bunch couldn't be tighter. To demand qualifications for high office or for any job at all is to discriminate against the unqualified, and we now know that discrimination is among the worst of sins. We are all equal and the supposed accomplishments and talents of Dr. Oz the heart surgeon really ought to count for nothing in an equitable society. We have made progress in the 'progressive' sense of the term. And we are better people for it. 

The disabled are just as qualified as the rest of us. For they are not really disabled at all; they are differently abled.  I myself was born with only one functioning ear. But this birth defect gives me the ability to block out sound in bed by putting my good ear down on the pillow. Clearly, this wonderful ability of mine compensates for all of the drawbacks of monaural hearing such as the inability to tell from which direction a sound is coming. The point generalizes: all disabilities are really abilities in disguise. No one should ever be evaluated in any way on the basis of supposed 'talents' or 'qualifications' or 'abilities' or 'accomplishments.' What I said in my first paragraph convicts me of the thought crime of 'ableism.'  I ought to check myself into the nearest 'progressive' re-education camp.

Losertarian Update

A tip of the hat to Dmitri Dain for sending us here where we read:

Libertarian Marc Victor dropped out of Arizona’s closely watched Senate race on Tuesday, encouraging voters to cast their ballots for Republican Blake Masters in his challenge to Sen. Mark Kelly (D).

Polls had shown Victor garnering support in the low single digits, but his small bloc of supporters could provide a critical boost to Masters, as surveys show the Republican only trailing Kelly by a few percentage points.

“Don’t vote for Marc Victor for Senate, vote for Blake Masters,” Victor said on Tuesday. “Blake’s in a very tight race here with Mark Kelly, and I want to see him win.”

Victor met virtually with Masters prior to dropping out of the race and posted a video of their roughly 20-minute conversation.

Hats off to Marc Victor for his good sense. To vote for him would have been utter folly since it is (a) certain that he would not have been elected and (b) certain that he would have siphoned off votes needed by the impressive Blake Masters to defeat the disgusting Mark Kelly.

Once more: politics is a practical game. Without the power to implement your policies, they are nothing but hot air and paper. Don't throw away your vote on unelectables. Don't confuse a political party with a discussion society. 

Marc  Victor is a local gun guy. Here is one of his videos. Here is another. He talks sense!