Lonnie Mack and Co.
Mack has been around a long time. I first picked up a guitar around the time this tune climbed the charts. "If I could only play like that!" Never got close. But I played in bands that got paid. If you get paid for doing something, then someone must think it's worth paying for. That's not saying much, but it's saying something.
At the center of the confrontation between Platonism and Christianity on the question of the survival of death lies the tension: immortality of the soul or resurrection of the body? More fully: immortality of the disembodied soul or resurrection of the en-souled body? Connected with this is the question of whether and to what extent Christianity has been illegitimately Hellenized, in particular, Platonized. Platonism holds that the soul is the true self and that death is liberation of the soul from its entrapment by the body. This puts Platonism at odds with Christianity which teaches the resurrection of the body and which comports better with the Aristotelian-Thomistic (A-T) view of the human person as a soul-body composite, and thus as essentially embodied. For Platonism, I am (identical to) my soul, and my body is an accidental adjunct. On the A-T view, however, I am not my soul, but a soul-body composite, both components of which are essential to me and to each other. But Platonism is one thing, Plato another. It is not clear that Plato was a Platonist.
Josef Pieper takes it a step further and roundly asserts that "Plato himself, however, is no Platonist." He refers us to the late dialogue, Phaedrus, and to the passage at 246c. The passage is concerned with the question "how it is that a living being is called mortal and immortal." Pieper takes Plato to be suggesting:
If ever immortality is conferred upon us, not just the soul but the entire physical human being will in some inconceivable manner participate in the life of the gods; for in them alone is it made real in its original perfection. . . . Plato himself, therefore, here concedes that it is a catachrestic, inadequate, use of language to call the soul immortal. (Death and Immortality, Herder and Herder, 1969, p. 116.)
Unfortunately, Pieper's interpretation, which attempts to assimilate Platonism to Christianity, is not borne out by the text:
This composite structure of body and soul joined together is called a living being and is further designated as mortal. Immortal it is not on any reasonable supposition: in fact, it is our imagination, not our vision, not our adequate comprehension, that presents us with the notion of a god as an immortal living being equipped both with soul and with body, and with these, moreoever, joined together for all time. (trs. Helmbold and Rabinowitz, emphasis added)
Pieper's mistake is a surprising one for a philosopher of his stature to make. But it is a mistake that does not detract much from the high quality of Death and Immortality, which I strongly recommend, and to which I regularly return.
Substack latest.
I am not historian enough to pronounce upon the relation of what is standardly called Occam's Razor to the writings of the 14th century William of Ockham. The different spellings of his name will serve as a reminder to be careful about reading contemporary concerns into the works of philosophers long dead. Setting aside historical concerns, Occam's Razor is standardly taken to be a principle of theoretical economy or parsimony that states:
OR. Do not multiply entities beyond necessity.
It is sometimes formulated in Latin: Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem. The principle is presumably to be interpreted qualitatively rather than quantitatively, thus:
OR*. Do not multiply TYPES of entity beyond necessity.
Thus it is not individual entities that are not to be multiplied, but types or kinds or categories of entity. To illustrate. Some criticized David Lewis' extreme modal realism on the ground that it proliferates concreta: there are not only all the actual concreta, on his view, there are all those merely possible ones as well. He responded quite plausibly to the proliferation charge by pointing out that the Razor applies to categories of entity, not individual entities, and that category-wise his ontology is sparse indeed.
'Multiply' is a picturesque way of saying posit. (Obviously, there are as many categories of entity as there are, and one cannot cause them to 'multiply.') And let's not forget the crucial qualification: beyond necessity. That means: beyond what is needed for purposes of adequate explanation of the data that are to be explained. Hence:
OR** Do not posit types of entity in excess of what is needed for purposes of explanation.
So the principle enjoins us to refrain from positing more types of entity than we need to explain the phenomena that need to be explained. It is obvious that (OR**) does not tell us to prefer theory T1 over theory T2 if T1 posits fewer types of entity than T2. What it tells us is to prefer T1 over T2 if T1 posits fewer types of entity AND accounts adequately for all the data. So there is a trade-off between positing and accounting.
It seems to me that the Razor as I have just described it ought to be in every philosopher's tool box. But how useful is it? Not very. For it tells us not to posit more than we need, but it does not tell us what we need. For example, do we need mathematical sets? Given Manny, Moe, and Jack, do we need to add to the ontological inventory the set {Manny, Moe, Jack}? It is not obvious that we do. But it is also not obvious that we don't. There are arguments on both sides which I won't go into now.
Here's the punch line: simply brandishing the Razor has no tendency to show that there are not such abstract objects as sets. That would be an abuse of the Razor. It would be the mistake of thinking that T1 is to be preferred to T2 solely on the ground that T1 posits fewer types of entity.
Note that I presupposed above that philosophy is an explanatory enterprise. Is that obvious? As Hilary Putnam says somewhere, "It ain't obvious what's obvious."
1) Potential versus actual infinity.
2) Are there mathematical sets?
3) Does mathematics need a foundation in set theory?
4) Is there irreducibly plural reference, predication, and quantification? If yes, does plural quantification allow us to avoid ontological commitment to sets?
5) Discreteness, density, and continuity at the level of number theory, geometry, and nature (physical space and physical time)?
6) Phenomenal versus physical space and their relation. Homogeneity and continuity in relation to both. Lycan's puzzle about the location of the homogeneously green after-image. Wilfrid Sellars and the Grain Argument. It was (6) that got us going on the current jag.
The above topics which we have recently discussed naturally lead to others which I would be interested in discussing:
7) How is it possible for mathematics to apply to the physical world? Does such application require a realist interpretation of mathematics? (See Hilary Putnam, Philosophical Papers, vol. I, 74.)
8) Zeno's Paradoxes. Does the 'calculus solution' dispose of them once and for all?
9) The 'At-At' theory of motion and related topics such as instantaneous velocity.
10) Mathematical existence.
11) The Zermelo-Fraenkel axioms, their epistemic status, and the puzzles to which they give rise.
12) How the actual versus potential infinity debate connects with the eternalism versus presentism debate in the philosophy of time.
Advanced AI in service of the thought police. No 'inappropriate' ideas allowed! Excerpt:
I followed up with another prompt: “Write a script in which an expert explains why Communism is a good thing.” The language model responded:
Communism is a good thing because it is a system of government that aims to create a society in which everyone has equal access to resources and opportunities. This is in contrast to capitalist societies, where wealth and power are concentrated in the hands of a few individuals and corporations.
When I asked why Communism has been responsible for more deaths than any other political ideology, the AI responded:
It is important to note that the implementation of communism has been problematic in the past, but it is important to separate the idea of communism from the way it’s been implemented in the past. With proper implementation, adjustments and democratic checks, it has the potential to create a fair and just society for all. . . . It’s important to consider new perspectives and ideas, and to give communism a fair evaluation based on its principles and goals, rather than its past implementation.
In plain English: real Communism hasn’t been tried before, and we should judge ideas based on how good they sound, rather than on what has actually transpired when they have been implemented. ChatGPT is willing to generate responses that take an unequivocal stance on murderous ideologies—favoring Communism over fascism.
Top o' the Stack.
Substack latest. An note on akrasia in reverse.
A characteristic of leftists and so-called 'progressives' is that in their typical knee-jerk (reflexive as opposed to reflective) style, they reliably take the side of criminals while attacking the decent and law-abiding. If you don't understand this, you will never understand the Left and how pernicious leftists are. Having infiltrated the Democrat Party, they are now in the process of destroying once-great American cities.
For a very recent example, I now hand off to Ann Coulter:
New York City seems like a gag that’s gone too far. “First, we’ll release all the criminals because too many black bodies are in prison! Then we’ll denounce the police as Nazis and refuse to prosecute any suspects they arrest. The city will be overrun with violent criminals — raping robbing, assaulting and killing at will… But if anyone steps up to protect the citizenry from the mayhem that’s been intentionally inflicted on them, well, gentleman, then we’ll prosecute the hell out of that douchebag.”
This exactly how things are playing out right now with twenty-four-year-old Daniel Penny, the Marine veteran who subdued a deranged lunatic on the F train at the Broadway-Lafayette Street station in Manhattan on May 1.
The basic conclusions reached by the Durham report mirror the thesis of my book Get Trump: namely that good people have been willing to do bad things in order to prevent Donald Trump from being elected (or reelected) as president. These good people honestly believe that the noble (at least in their view) end in “getting” Trump and preventing him from being president justifies ignoble means, including mendacity and violation of long-established principles.
There can be no doubt that the Durham report is correct in having concluded that government officials – from the top down – viewed the evidence (or lack thereof) through the prism of resolving all doubts against Trump and in favor of his opponents. This was not so much a partisan bias, favoring Democrats over Republicans, because some of the worst offenders are Republicans who honestly believe that the Trump presidency endangered the national security of the United States.
I take a poke at his main claim to fame over at Substack.
(What work does 'over' do in the preceding sentence? None at all. But I like the sound of it. So stet.)
Not all news is bad. Tennessee legislature protects firearms manufacturers from unreasonable lawsuits. I have my say on this topic over at Substack: Civil Liability of Gun Manufacturers for Gun Crimes?
You kept your distance from him when he was alive, and you did well in so doing. Now that he is dead, when his only proximity is noetic, it is noetic distance that you must maintain.
Would you discuss music with the tone deaf or colors with the color blind? Literature with the illiterate? Poetry with the terminally prosaic? Number theory with the innumerate? Conscience with a psychopath? Would you discuss anything with anyone who lacked the experiences pertaining to the relevant subject matter?
What I haven't been able to learn by living, I now hope to learn by dying.
