Month: August 2025

The Sam Tanenhaus Biography of William F. Buckley

I came across it at the local library but the sheer weight of the thing dissuaded me from checking it out.  I borrowed  Jake Tapper's light-weight (in both senses) Original Sin instead. I cannot recommend it. William Voegli's review of Tanenhaus, William F. Buckley and the Conservative Future, I can recommend.  It raises the question: Is Donald Trump the political heir of National Review's founder?

Here are its final paragraphs. The bolded portions earn the coveted MavPhil plenary endorsement.

The relationship between Buckley and Trump is also contested among conservatives. For critics like Brookhiser and Will, Trump’s coarse manner is inseparable from the coarseness of his politics. Conservatism, they argue, must be reclaimed by men of character and intellect, like Buckley and Reagan. In his review of Buckley, Brookhiser calls Trump a “malignant clown,” whose prominence within conservatism is “our problem,” not Buckley’s fault.

There appears to be no clear solution to this problem, as restoring conservatism to its status quo ante-Trump grows increasingly implausible. And the awkward fact is that Trump, over one full term and the beginnings of another, has delivered on goals that conservatives had spent generations trying to achieve.

Consider affirmative action. Since Lyndon Johnson’s 1965 executive order made it integral to federal operations, six Republican presidents—Trump (as 45) among them—held the Oval Office for a combined 32 years without rescinding it, despite a steady drumbeat of conservative criticism. In 2025, Trump (as 47) finally signed an executive order nullifying Johnson’s. His action built on the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision declaring affirmative action unconstitutional in college admissions—a decision made possible by the three justices Trump appointed in his first term.

Those same three were part of the six-justice majority that year to overturn Roe v. Wade, which conservatives had denounced for nearly half a century with little effect. And while the game is not over, it exactly wrong in The Death of Conservatism. The good conservatives are the troublemakers: those who do not accept that it is indecent to disparage and impossible to reverse liberalism’s advances. The bad conservatives are the acquiescent ones, Goldberg’s Sherpas or Michael Anton’s Washington Generals, whose role in our politics is “to show up and lose.”

Trump 47 has already done more to defund public broadcasting and the Department of Education than any of his Republican predecessors—not to mention the conservative commentators who spent decades demanding just that.

The growing number of conservatives who are pro-Trump, or at least Trump-tolerant, think that Tanenhaus got it exactly wrong in The Death of Conservatism. The good conservatives are the troublemakers: those who do not accept that it is indecent to disparage and impossible to reverse liberalism’s advances. The bad conservatives are the acquiescent ones, Goldberg’s Sherpas or Michael Anton’s Washington Generals, whose role in our politics is “to show up and lose.”

In 1955, William F. Buckley launched National Review—and the conservative movement—with the famous declaration that the magazine “stands athwart history, yelling Stop.” Within conservatism, there has long been debate over whether the yelling is the point, decrying the demise of civic and social virtues too good to endure in this benighted world, or whether the real goal is to effect some stopping. Due to changes that Donald Trump both causes and reflects, the stoppers are now ascendant over the yellers. While Sam Tanenhaus disapproves of this shift, his imperfect but valuable biography does little to dispel the suspicion that William Buckley would have welcomed it.  

Spread Mind

Reader Matteo sends us here, where we read:

So let me tell you why the Spread Mind promises to solve one of the most difficult problems in the history of science and philosophy.

First, allow me to be clear about the terminology. First, all my efforts are based on a straightforward empirical hypothesis, the so called Mind-Object Identity hypothesis (MOI), namely the hypothesis that

The experience of X is one and the same as X

This should not come as a surprise to anybody. If our conscious experience is real, it must be something! And since the world is made only of physical stuff, there has to be something physical that is one and the same as our experience. I know, I know, many people have been looking for consciousness inside the brain. Have they succeeded? No. So let’s start looking for consciousness elsewhere. Where? In the very external objects around our body.

At this point I stopped reading. (Well, I did skim the rest, but it got no better.)

Yes, conscious experience is real. My present visual experiencing of a tree (or as of a tree to be precise) is undoubtedly real. And so the experiencing is, not just something, but something that exists. What the experiencing is of or about is, let us assume, also real.  Now we cannot just assume that "the world is made up only of physical stuff," but suppose that that is true. Still, the act and its object are two, not one: the experiencing and the tree experienced cannot be numerically identical even if both are physical. 

On the face of it, then, MOI is simply absurd.

This quickie response does not, of course, put paid to every theory of extended mind.

Am I being fair, Matteo?

Edith Stein: Faith, Reason, and Method

August 9th is the feast day of St. Theresa Benedicta of the Cross in the Catholic liturgy.  She is better known to philosophers as Edith Stein (1891-1942), brilliant Jewish student of and assistant to Edmund Husserl, philosopher in her own right, Roman Catholic convert, Carmelite nun, victim of the Holocaust at Auschwitz, and saint of the Roman Catholic Church. One best honors a philosopher by re-enacting his thoughts, sympathetically but critically. Herewith, a bit of critical re-enactment.

In the 1920s Stein composed an imaginary dialogue between her two philosophical masters, Edmund Husserl and Thomas Aquinas. Part of what she has them discussing is the nature of faith.

Read the rest at Substack.

The piece concludes:

So there you have it. There are two opposing conceptions of philosophy, one based on the autonomy of reason, and with it the exclusively internal validation of all knowledge claims, the other willing to sacrifice the autonomy of reason for the sake of truths which cannot be certified by reason or subjectively validated but which are provided by faith in revelation, a revelation that must simply be accepted in humility and obedience. It looks as if one must simply decide which of these two conceptions to adopt, and accept that the decision cannot be justified by (natural) reason.

Addenda (8/9/2025)

  • I say above that there are two opposing conceptions of philosophy, but is that right? Perhaps not. It might be closer to the truth to say that philosophy by its very nature rests on the autonomy of reason, and that the  "other conception" is not philosophy sensu stricto but a worldview. If so, any view according to which "faith is its own guarantee" is not philosophy or a philosophy, but beyond philosophy.
  • Thomas wears at least four 'hats.' He is a philosopher, a Christian, a Christian theologian, and a mystic.  You could be any one of these without being any one of the others. He plays the philosopher in the praeambula fidei of the Summa Theologica wherein he attempts to demonstrate the existence of God in his quinque viae or Five Ways.  These proofs make no appeal to divine revelation via Scripture nor do they rest on the personal deliverances of mystical experience. They proceed by discursive reason alone on the basis of sense experience.
  • So you could say to me that Thomas's theistic worldview is not beyond philosophy inasmuch as the philosophy of the praeambula is an integral part of his defense of the Christian worldview. My response will be that the Five Ways do not conclusively prove the existence of God, let alone provide any support for such specifically Christian doctrines as Trinity and Incarnation (which of course they were not intended to do). So in the end, a will-driven leap of faith is required to arrive at Thomas's theistic worldview. So at best, the Five Ways are arguments (not proofs) that render rationally acceptable Christian belief.  Rationally acceptable, but not rationally mandatory. In the end you must decide what to believe and how you will live. My concluding sentence, "the decision cannot be justified by (natural) reason" is not quite right. I should have written: the decision to accept the Christian worldview, while neither it, nor the generic theism at its base, can be proven from natural reason operating upon the deliverances of the sense, can nonetheless be rendered rationally acceptable.
  • "Go ahead, believe!" Thus spoke Wittgenstein. "What harm can it do?" I add: you won't be flouting any canons of rationality.

The Theological Virtue of Hope

RCC Catechism: 

1817. Hope is the theological virtue by which we desire the kingdom of heaven and eternal life as our happiness, placing our trust in Christ's promises and relying not on our own strength, but on the help of the grace of the Holy Spirit.

Now listen to Pope Leo:

The pontiff [Leo] said that the Jubilee Year of Hope “encourages the universal Church and indeed the entire world to reflect on this essential virtue, which Pope Francis described as the desire and expectation of good things to come despite or not knowing what the future may bring.”

I am no theologian, but Pope Francis's description of the theological virtue of hope leaves something to be desired. Compare it to the quotation immediately preceding. Is Leo, who seems to be uncritically accepting Francis's description, much of an improvement over his predecessor?

Papyrology and AI: the Library at Herculaneum

How much of a curse and how much of a blessing  Artificial Intelligence will prove to be remains to be seen. Book this on the blessing side of the ledger:

The University of Kentucky (UKY) has announced it is a co-recipient of a $13.5 million (€11.5 million) grant from the European Research Council in support of an international effort to decipher ancient papyrus scrolls carbonized and buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE.

[. . .]

The award will enable the consortium to scale its efforts over the next six years to digitally recover, analyze, and read text from hundreds of papyrus scrolls that have until now been undecipherable. In addition, the project will leverage AI to connect pieces of scrolls, find patterns in how the library at Herculaneum was organized, and help establish best practices to preserve the collection. The project may uncover as much as 4.5 million words of entirely new Greek and Latin literature.

 

Thomas Merton: Attraction, Repulsion, Fascination

I am attracted by his openness to influence from diverse quarters, his Whitmanic "I am large; I contain multitudes," his Terentian "nothing human is foreign to me," and his relentless self-examination.

I am repulsed by his lack of mental rigor and and his liberal propensity for squish and gush in matters political. And then there was his need for attention. He was too much enamoured of name and fame, and too fearful of being forgotten. He would have liked to flee the world but was unable to achieve escape velocity and could only orbit around her. Her gravitational attraction was no match for the grace he was granted. I allude to Simone Weil's brilliant title, "Gravity and Grace." 

I am fascinated by his inner conflicts as I am by those of Julien Green, as revealed in his exceedingly rich diary, not to mention the inner conflicts I find in myself.  

Wer schreibt, der bleibt

I fondly recall my late German neighbor, Günter Scheer, from whom I learned this expression.   "He who writes, remains."

But for how long? Any mark you make will in the end be unmade by time, in time, for all time. We do not write in indelible ink. Old Will said it well:

We are such stuff / As dreams are made on, and our little life / Is rounded with a sleep. (Prospero in The Tempest)

Heraclitus of Ephesus famously wept over the impermanence of things and the vanity of existence as did a certain latter-day Heraclitean. "I am grieved by the transitoriness of things," wrote Friedrich Nietzsche in a letter to Franz Overbeck, dated 24 March 1887.

Heraclitus Weeping

Addendum (8/9/2025):

In a letter from 1881, Nietzsche wrote to Overbeck:

My dear friend, what is this our life? A boat that swims in the sea, and all one knows for certain about it is that one day it will capsize. Here we are, two good old boats that have been faithful neighbors, and above all your hand has done its best to keep me from 'capsizing'! Let us then continue our voyage — each for the other's sake, for a long time yet, a long time! We should miss each other so much! Tolerably calm seas and good winds and above all sun — what I wish for myself, I wish for you, too, and am sorry that my gratitude can find expression only in such a wish and has no influence at all on wind or weather.[1]

From Wikipedia.

‘Pastime’

Whatever we are here for, we are not here to pass time. Our time is to be used and used well. You say it doesn't matter how we spend our time since nothing matters? That may or may not be so.  But it matters which.  If something does matter and you live as if nothing matters you may end up not only having wasted your time but  your eternity as well. So time  spent getting to the bottom of this question is time well spent. 

‘Per’ versus ‘As Per’

I have become annoyed recently by the increasing use of 'per' instead of 'as per' by journalists. Here is an example:

And that essentially was the end of her [Kamala's] campaign. Per Democratic strategist James Carville, “It’s the one question that you exist to answer, all right? That is it. That’s the money question. That’s the one you want. That’s the one that everybody wants to know the answer to. And you freeze, you literally freeze, and you say, ‘Well, I can’t think of anything,'” he said in a postelection analysis.

Is my annoyance misplaced?  I love the English language, my beloved mother tongue, and it angers me when people misuse and maltreat her. But in this case I may have overreacted.  Merriam Webster:

The fact is that both per and as per have existed in English in the sense “according to” for a very long time–since the 15th and 16th centuries, respectively. The choice of which to use (or avoid) is entirely a matter of taste. The more ponderous as per is often found in business and legal prose, or in writing that attempts to adopt a formal tone. It is not incorrect to use, but some find it overly legalistic and counsel avoiding it for that reason.

Butchvarov’s Paradox of Antirealism and Husserl’s Paradox of Human Subjectivity

Top o' the Stack.

UPDATE (8/4/2025). Matteo writes, "As for your latest post on Substack about the dehumanization of the ego, there is this Italian philosopher who holds a very similar view (consciousness and the world are the very same thing, we literally ARE the world etc." 

https://archive.org/details/spreadmindwhycon0000manz