Author: Bill Vallicella

Left, Right, Gender, and Sex

There is nothing in the graphic below to disagree with, although more could be said. But one quibble: The correct word is not 'gender,' but 'sex.' Gender is a grammatical category first and foremost. But it is not unreasonable to allow a widening of the term to cover certain social roles that one's sex fits one to play.  So if you want to talk about gender roles, go right ahead. One such is the firefighter role.  This is a social role typically filled by biological males, and for good reason. Men make better firefighters than women due to their  greater physical strength, an attribute grounded in their sex, which is a biological category.  That men are physically stronger than women is a generic statement, and such a statement, since it is not a universal affirmative, cannot be refuted by adducing cases in which some woman is stronger than some man.

So it is entirely natural and unsurprising that men are 'over-represented' among firefighters. You would have to be in the grip of the 'equity' delusion to think that there is something wrong with this 'over-representation.' The term is here being used in its factual or non-normative sense. It is a mark of the muddled to confuse factual and normative uses of terms. There are proportionally more male firefighters than female. This is a 'feature' grounded in biological  reality not a 'bug' introduced by 'sexists.' It is a fact that does not need fixing.

Wokesters are social constructivists gone wild. No doubt there are social constructs. For example, textbooks of biology are social constructs. They would not exist if social animals such as ourselves did not exist and did not interact socially to produce them and to consume them. Biology itself is a cooperative social enterprise, and, as such, a social construct.  Just don't confuse biology with the biotic, or, in general, the study of some range of natural  phenomena with the natural phenomena studied.  Biology is a social construct, but the biologists we are familiar with are all of them human animals and therefore not social constructs.

It should be obvious that not everything could be a social construct. Life itself, as a necessary precondition of all social constructing, cannot itself be a social construct.  The same goes for the abiotic stratum that undergirds the biotic. Could the social constructors themselves be social constructs? Whose? Who constructs the constructors? Either a vicious infinite regress arises, or you must accept the nonsense of social constructivist bootstrapping: one socially constructs oneself. And note that such  self-construction could not be social if others did not help with the task. This adds a further layer of absurdity. If my self-construction requires your help, and yours mine, then we must first exist non-socially in order to socially construct each other. But then I am not, at bottom, a social construct.

And then there is the fact that, before human beings came along, there already was sexual polarity in plants and animals.  Will you seriously maintain that there was no such sexual polarity before humans made the scene and started doing botany and biology? 

If you think about all of this carefully, you should be able to see the absurdity of the idea of 're-imagining' (as a wokester might say) what is natural and both logically and temporally antecedent to the social as a social construct. The world cannot be social construction 'all the way down.'

I cannot explain it now in any detail, but this woke social constructivism, which issues in such lunacies as that babies on birth are 'assigned' their sex, is a particularly virulent and degenerate form of metaphysical idealism according to which reality is mind-made. This idealist motif has coherent articulations, but woke social constructivism is not one of them. 


Left-Right Agendas

Why are Women ‘Over-Represented’ among Realtors?

Here is my Substack answer to the title question together with a healthy serving of conceptual analysis as part of  my ongoing quest to disembarrass sad wokeheads and Dementocrats of their fatuities, fallacies, and overall intellectual feculence. ('Feculence' as you may know is from feces.)  I am being polite. I am showing some 'class.' 

But here is something very important for you to know.

In the political sphere, and not just there, the ability to kick ass is far more important than class. The first value clearly trumps the second. It is a mark of a RINO not to understand this.

So I predict that, even if the Republicans gain control of both the House and the Senate come November, they will not deploy their majorities in an effective way against their political enemies. Little will get done to reverse the assault on the Republic. And that is because they, as a group and because of the large number of RINOs, do not have the civil courage to punch back in the manner in which they are punched at. 

Trump tried to teach them how to fight, but they ignored his clear message, or, more likely, they simply lack the civil courage to implement it.  Of the four cardinal virtues, courage is the most difficult to display. For it, unlike the other three, exacts a high cost.  I myself lack the courage, not to mention the social skills, to enter the political arena. I'm Italian, a lover not a fighter — until pushed to the wall.

In any case, no true philosopher could consider the political the locus of ultimate reality.

Book Lust

The old man's libido may be on the wane, but this man's book lust  remains as stiff-standing as ever.  I'm reading along in Anthony Kenny's Aquinas on Being and I find a footnote in which he praises a certain Hermann Weidemann's article contained in a certain anthology. I think, "Oh boy, when I am in Tempe on Friday I'll snag that volume from the Arizona State University  library."

In the bookman's eros we descry the superiority of the spirit over the flesh. The pleasures of the mind can extend for decades, from earliest youth to advanced old age.  But not even the artifices of a Hugh Hefner can help those enmired  in the dotage and decrepitude of the flesh.

At the end, even stoked to the max with Viagra to the point of hearing loss, Hef couldn't get it up sufficiently to penetrate the young lovelies who cavorted around him. He was reduced to manual mode while the bunnies romped with each other exchanging intimacies I charitably imagine to be more innocently sororal than libidinously lesbian.

Are the Names on Grave Stones Proper Names?

You will reflexively answer in the affirmative. But the names on grave stones are proper names for only so long as the memories of survivors are extant to supply reference-fixing context. With the passing of the survivors the names revert to commonality. After a while the dead may as well lie in a common grave. 

No matter how unusual the name, every so-called proper name either actually has, or could have had, more than one bearer. A name that has more than one bearer is surely not proper, but common.  Thus so-called proper names are not properly so-called.  If a name  has exactly one bearer  in actuality, but could have had more than one, then it does not designate either one.  

Names are rigid designators in Kripke's sense.

What lies below the stone is not Patrick J. McNally, but a Patrick J. McNally.  And not even this; rather, the bodily remains of a Patrick J. McNally.  The person has fled or else no longer exists.

Artifacts, Organisms, and Modes of Existence

Hello Dr. Vallicella, greetings from Germany!

I have been revisiting your paper "Existence: Two Dogmas of Analysis" in Neo-Aristotelian Perspectives in Metaphysics, eds. Novotny and Novak, Routledge, 2014, pp. 45-75.  One of the most intriguing arguments you give against the opponent of modes of being/existence is the argument at the end against Peter van Inwagen's semantic claim that 'exist(s)' is univocal in sense and the corresponding ontological claim that there are no modes of being/existence. On p. 67 you present the following aporetic pentad and argue that it is best solved by the rejection of (5).  

1. The house exists.
2. The bricks exist.
3. The house is composed of the bricks, all of them, and of nothing else and is therefore not something distinct from them or  in addition to them.
4. Since the bricks can exist without the house but the house cannot exist without the bricks, the house is distinct from the bricks.
5. “Exist(s)” is univocal in (1) and (2), and there are no modes of existence.

The house doesn't exist apart from the bricks arranged house-wise, and yet if we reject mereological nihilism,  there must be something not identical to the bricks that makes up the house. Did I broadly capture the idea?

BV:  Broadly, yes. The five propositions are individually plausible to a very high degree, and yet they are collectively inconsistent: they cannot all be true. So we have a problem if we wish to uphold the law of non-contradiction. And we certainly want to hold onto said law if at all possible. One way to solve the problem is by rejecting the least plausible proposition. That, I claim, is (5). Van Inwagen would instead reject (1) and (4).  He and I will accept (2) and (3)  as the most plausible of the five propositions.  Of course, you have to understand that this is a 'toy example,' so to speak. After all, each brick is an artifact so that, if the house does not exist because it is an artifact, as per van Inwagen's teaching, then neither do the bricks. In the spirit of the 'toy example,' think of the bricks as atoms in the etymological sense: as really indivisible or non-partite. 

What (3) says is that the house is not something 'over and above' its parts. It is not an entity in addition to them. So if the house is composed of 50,000 bricks, then there are 50,000 entities in the place where the bricks are, not 50,001.  The house just is the bricks. (Mereology is ontologically innocent.) To appreciate the plausibility of this, suppose that the Wise Pig has just finished building his brick house, and you say to him, "I see all the bricks, Mr. Pig, but where is the house?" He will respond, "You, sir, are committing the fallacy of hypostatization: the house just is the bricks; it is not something 'above and beyond it.'"

As for (4), I think it is obviously true.  While I grant that the house is not something 'over and above' the bricks, it is also not just the bricks, but the house-wise arrangement of the bricks, an arrangement that is not nothing, but something real that makes the house distinct from the bricks. 

And so I reject (5) and say that, while house and bricks both exist, they exist in different ways.  By my lights, this is more intellectually palatable than the strange doctrine that there are no artifacts.  

I want to propose a way to strengthen the argument however. Despite your qualms with it, I see the appeal of mereological nihilism for artifacts, since it's questionable whether the "house" as distinct from the bricks is really needed here, or whether it can be eliminated for the mere arrangement of bricks.

BV:  It seems to me that the house must be distinct from the bricks for the simple reason that the bricks can exist without constituting a house, whereas the house cannot exist without the bricks.  A pile of bricks does not make a house. I would also insist that the house-wise arrangement of the bricks is not nothing. It is not nothing because it makes the difference between bricks that can shelter the pig and bricks that cannot.  The house is of course a dependent entity in that it depends for its existence on the bricks, but it does so without being identical to the bricks. That is why I say that the house exists in a different way than the constituent bricks, contrary to van Inwagen's claim that there are no ways or modes of existence. 

As long as there is no telos the house would have that can't be identified with the mere arrangement of bricks, the question is valid. Obviously if we look at something complex and goal directed like the immune system, the reduction here to the mere arrangement of the most basic particles sounds almost preposterous.

BV: Granted, the bricks taken collectively do not have an in-built telos or a nisus towards actualization; nevertheless, the house cannot be reductively identified with the bricks. The bricks can survive the demolition of the house, and at any time t at which the bricks form a house, the bricks might not have formed a house at t. The house is doubly contingent: it is contingent on the bricks and it is contingent on their proper arrangement. Or so it seems to me.

The question thus doesn't seem to arise when we're concerned with biological entities and their complex actions. Mereological nihilism for animals is not a view worth discussing and van Inwagen explicitly rejects it, instead opting for a kind of non-reductionism while still holding onto a view he identifies as materialism ("A Materialist Ontology of Human Persons" 2007). What I dispute, given your initial argument above, however is the compatibility of this position with his rejection of modes of being. If your aporia is correct and the opponent would have to embrace mereological nihilism for artifacts, doesn't that expand into the biological realm as well? It seems so, at least I don't see why it should be invalid [should not so expand.]

BV: I'm not sure I follow you here.  Van Inwagen is clearly not a nihilist with respect to organisms. (I am not a nihilist with respect to artifacts or organisms.) Are you asking whether his non-reductionism with respect to organisms commits him to the MOB doctrine? (MOB = modes of being.)

So let's reformulate your pentad:

1. The dog exists.
2. The atoms exist (atom designating a fundamental, simple physical and no relevant scientific theory)
3. The dog is composed of its atoms, all of them and of nothing else and is therefore not something distinct from them or in addition to them.
4. Since the atoms can exist without the dog,  but the dog can't exist without the atoms, the dog is distinct from its atoms.
5. “Exist(s)” is univocal in (1) and (2), and there are no modes of existence.

What do you think? If your argument can be reformulated this way we either show that non-reductionism and a rejection of modes of beings are contrarians [logical contraries? or logical contradictories?], so that one must be false. Or the interlocutor is forced to adopt an additional thesis that is at best questionable within a materialist/post-Cartesian ontology, e.g. that the particles are only virtually present in the human, but I doubt van Inwagen has any space in his theory for such positions of Aristotelians like David Oderberg.

Thanks for your time.

BV: I take it you are asking whether van Inwagen's views about living things commit him to the acceptance of modes of being/existence.  To answer that question I would have to pull Material Beings from the shelf and devote hours to re-reading the relevant portions, and for that I do not have time at present. 

The Decline of the West Proceeds Apace

Roger Kimball:

Angry at the Gyndes River for sweeping away and drowning one of his sacred white horses, Cyrus decided to punish the river by having his slaves cut 360 channels into it, stanching its flow to a trickle. This we have done to ourselves, applying mental tourniquets to the arteries that fed us from the past in order that we might gambol undisturbed in distracted present-tense ignorance. An illustrative case in point is the Princeton classics department, where woke educationists panting for relevance recently jettisoned the requirement that its students learn Latin or Greek, never mind both. At the same time, they publicly celebrate the fifty-seven varieties of racial-trans-wonderfulness that have become the focus of academic obsession. It is a situation that is as absurd as it is malignant.

In The Present Age(1846), Kierkegaard described the jaded spirit that “leaves everything standing but cunningly empties it of significance.” That is where we are today: occupying a husk of decadence assiduously emptied of vitality. Princeton, Yale, Harvard, and the rest of the querulous educational establishment are sodden with money but spiritually and intellectually bankrupt. They continue to look like educational institutions: leafy walks, imposing libraries, impressive buildings. But most of the activities they sponsor are inimical to real education, inciting thousands of puny Cyruses to divert and stymie the waters of tradition in order to polish the mirror of their narcissism.

The sun is setting in the Land of the Evening. Our going under may be inevitable, but there is no use in supposing it to be so. Man up, fight on, calmly but daily. Your alma mater asks for money? Refuse her. That's one thing you can do. All understand it. Money is the common currency of fallen man.