Author: Bill Vallicella

Living in the Past: Is That Why You Are Still a Democrat?

To understand a person, it helps to consider what the world was like when the person was twenty years old. At twenty, give or take five years, the music of the day, the politics of the day, the language, mores, fashions, economic conditions and whatnot of the day make a very deep impression. It is an impression that lasts through life and functions as a sort of benchmark for the evaluation of what comes after, but also as a distorting lens that makes it difficult for the person to see what is happening now. 

The foregoing insight may help us understand why people remain in the Democrat Party. People born in the 'twenties are many of them still living in the 'forties. For them the Democrat Party is the party of FDR. They haven't noticed the changes, or haven't wanted to notice the changes. They haven't noticed that their interests are no longer served by the party of this name. Or perhaps they are just attached to the label, or in the grip of misplaced piety: they are attached to a family tradition. "My pappy was a Democrat and my grandpappy afore him was a Democrat; we McCoy's have always been Democrats, and we don't see no reason to change now."

As You Know . . .

. . . there seem to be no limits of logic or sanity on what a 'liberal' will maintain. The latest lunacy is the politically correct prohibition of the phrase 'as you know.'  You must not say this because it might make a snowflake feel inadequate.

Permit me to explain why some of us use the phrase in question.

We use it out of civility and because we understand human nature.  People don't like to be told things. If I tell you that the first ten amendments to the U. S. Constitution are called the Bill of Rights, you might think I am talking down to you or lecturing you or suggesting that you are ignorant.  The prefatory 'as you know' gives you the benefit of the doubt. You either know or you don't know. If you know, he you may respond, "Of course." If you don't know, you may admit that you were ignorant of the point or you may remain silent.

'As you know' is a phrase that contributes to civil discourse. But civility is a conservative virtue and it is perhaps too much to expect a leftist to understand it or its value.

Civility demonstrated. Comity enhanced.

To feel slightly inadequate for not knowing something is not bad but good. But persuading people of this in this Age of Feeling may prove difficult.  The purpose of life is not to feel good about oneself. The purpose of education is not to inculcate in students self-esteem but to teach them something so that they will have legitimate grounds for self-esteem.

The Left is destructive in many ways and on many fronts. We of the Coalition of the Sane must oppose them in many ways and on many fronts. 

On the language front we must never bow to their foolish innovations but must proudly speak and write standard English.  

If they take offense, then point out to them that their offense is inappropriately taken.  If a black person objects to 'black hole' or 'niggardly,' then explain their meanings and how any offense taken is wrongly taken.

Say this to leftists: "You are free to speak and write in any silly way you like, but only so long as you allow us to speak and write standard English."

But leftists are a hostile and vicious bunch, unteachable and impervious to reason.  So keep in mind my 2010 aphorism:

It is not reasonable to be reasonable with everyone.  Some need to be met with the hard fist of unreason.  The reasonable know that reason's sphere of application is not limitless.

Herein the germs of yet another argument for Second Amendment rights. Those rights are the concrete back-up to all the others. 

Lev Shestov on Edmund Husserl

In Memory of a Great Philosopher

It is just at this point that we find the most enigmatic and significant contribution of Husserl's philosophy. For here the question arises: Why did Husserl demand with such extraordinary insistence that I read Kierkegaard? For Kierkegaard, in contrast to Husserl, sought the truth not in reason but in the Absurd. For him the law of contradiction – like an angel with a drawn sword, stationed by God at the entrance to Paradise – bears no witness to the truth and in no way defines the boundaries which separate the possible from the impossible. For Kierkegaard, philosophy (which he calls "existential") begins precisely at that point where reason sees, with the force of self-evidence, that all possibilities have already been exhausted, that everything is finished, that nothing remains but for man to look and grow cold. Kierkegaard here introduces into philosophy what he calls "faith," defined as "an insane struggle for the possible," that is, for the possibility of the impossible – clearly alluding to the words of Scripture: Man's wisdom is folly in the sight of the Lord. 

Men fear folly and madness more than anything else in the world. Kierkegaard knows this; he repeatedly asserts that human frailty is afraid to look into the eyes of death and madness. To be sure, we read in the Phaedo that philosophy is "a preparation for death," that all men who have genuinely devoted themselves to philosophy, although "they may have concealed it from others, have done nothing else than prepare themselves for the act of dying and the fact of death." It seems likely that these extraordinary ideas were suggested to Plato by the death of Socrates. Plato did not return to them; he was wholly absorbed in the Republic and the Laws, even in his extreme old age – thus fulfilling, like ordinary mortals and gladiators, the age-old demand: salve, Caesar, morituri te salutant. Even in the face of death men cannot tear themselves away from "Caesar," from what everyone accepts as "reality." And this is "natural"! For how are we to understand the "preparation for death"? Is it not a beginning of, and preparation for, the struggle against the demonstrative character of proof, against the law of contradiction, against reason s claim to unlimited rights, its seizure of the power of arbitrary definition of the point at which possibility ends and impossibility begins – the struggle against the angel who stands with drawn sword at the gate of Paradise? It seems to the inexperienced gaze that this measureless power rightfully belongs to reason, and that there is nothing dreadful or threatening in the fact that it does. 

Ave_Caesar_Morituri_te_Salutant_(Gérôme)_01

Ave Caesar Morituri te Salutant, by Jean-Léon Gérôme (1859), depicting gladiators greeting Vitellius

"Hail Caesar, we who  are about to die salute you."

Sea of a Heartbreak

I've loved the great Don Gibson crossover number all my life ever since first hearing it in 1960 over one of the Southern California pop stations, probably KFWB 980 on the AM band. 

Here is a very creditable live cover by one Joe Brown which I have just now heard for the first time. But nothing touches or ever will touch the original.

Time to Shut Down the Leftist Seminaries?

The universities have become seminaries of leftism.  'Seminary' is from semen, seed. The universities have become seed beds in which the seeds of America's destruction are planted in skulls full of mush. Time to shut them down says philosophy professor Jason D. Hill.  You decide whether he has gone too far or is basically on track.

When the term "Western civilization" is equated with racism, cultural superiority and pervasive oppression, and students in my political philosophy class refuse to study the works of John Stuart Mill or John Locke (or any other white thinker) because they consider them white supremacists, there is no lower level of educational hell.

[. . .]

Cultural Marxism, defined as anti-capitalist cultural critique, is the educational trope that mediates all forms of learning in today's universities – and it is simply a guise under which to politically indoctrinate students into becoming socialists who will do anything to prohibit freedom of speech on college campuses. We are witnessing a generation that will not tolerate other perspectives, students who will not hear opposing ideologies.

Socialism advocates vesting ownership and control of the means of production, capital and land in the community as a whole. Socialism is not a morally neutral system. Any system of governance presupposes an answer to the questions: Are you a sovereign entity who owns your life, work and mind? Is your mind something that can be nationalized and its material contents distributed by the state? Socialists think the answer is yes. They believe the products of one's efforts belong to the community; that the state and society have a moral and financial responsibility to care for other people's children; and that the most successful and productive people should be the most penalized.

[. . .]

You who fund our universities do so with trust that intellectuals will act in your interest and reflect your pro-American values. You are wrong. Your hard work has been financing people who think they are better than your crass materialism, who think that you (but not they) are complicit in an evil system (capitalism).

Withdraw your support and leave them to fund themselves. Let them pit their wares on the free market, where they will be left homeless. The world you desired no longer exists in our universities. It lies elsewhere, in a philosophic system waiting to be discovered or created.

Jason D. Hill is honors distinguished professor of philosophy at DePaul University in Chicago. His areas of specialization include ethics, social and political philosophy, American foreign policy, cosmopolitanism and race theory. He is the author of several books, including "We Have Overcome: An Immigrant's Letter to the American People" (Bombardier Books/Post Hill Press). Follow him on Twitter @JasonDhill6.

Presentism Misunderstood

One misunderstanding floated in the Facebook Medieval Logic forum is that presentism in the current analytic philosophy of time is the thesis that 'exists' and 'is present' are synonyms.  

Not at all. It is obvious that 'exists' and 'is present' do not have the same meaning or sense. If I say that God exists, I need not be  saying that God is present, and this  for the simple reason that God, if eternal as opposed to everlasting, is 'outside of time' and therefore neither past, nor present, nor future.  

Some philosophers hold that numbers and other so-called 'abstract objects' are timeless entities.  If they are, then they are precisely not present.  A fortiori, they are not past or future either.  If they exist, then they exist 'outside of time.'  But then 'exists' and 'is present' can't have the same meaning.

Now suppose there are no timeless entities and that everything is 'in time.'  It would still not be the case that 'exists' and 'is present' have the same meaning or sense.  The following questions make sense and are substantive in the sense that they do not have trivial answers:

Is everything that exists present? Or are there things that exist that are not present?

But the following questions have trivial answers:

Is everything present present? Or are there present things that are not present?

The answer to the first question in the second pair is a tautology and thus trivially true. The answer to the second is a contradiction and thus trivially false.

Since the first two questions are substantive, 'exists' and 'is present' are not synonyms.

G. E. Moore famously responded to the hedonist's claim that the only goods are pleasures by asking, in effect: But is pleasure good?  The point is that the sense of 'good' allows us reasonably to resist the identification of goodness and pleasure.  For it remains an open question whether pleasure really is good. Similarly, the sense of 'exists' allows us reasonably to resist the identification of existence and temporal presentness. If a thing exists it remains an open question whether it is present.  There exists a prime number between 3 and 7. 'Is it present?' is a legitimate question. It won't be if numbers are timeless.  So again we see that 'exists' and 'is present' are not synonymous expressions.

Consider now my cat Max. Max exists (present tense) and he is temporally present. Is his existence exhausted by his temporal presence? Or is he temporally present because he exists? These are legitimate questions. It is not obvious that Max's existence is exhausted by his temporal presentness. It could be that there is more to his existence than his temporal presentness.  Since these questions make sense and are substantive, it follows that 'existence' and 'temporal presentness' are not synonyms.

If the presentist is not making a synonymy claim, what claim is he making? One type of presentist puts forth the following equivalence:

P. Necessarily, for all items x in time, x (tenselessly) exists iff x is present.

This is not a semantic claim, but an ontological claim, a claim about what exists.  The presentist  is saying that a correct ontological inventory of temporal items restricts them to present items.  As opposed to what? As opposed to the 'pastist' who holds that the ontological inventory counts both past and present items as existing, and the the 'eternalist' who includes past, present, and future items in the count.

Ed the medievalist writes,

I know nothing about the modern view of presentism, or where the term ‘presentism’ comes from. Is the view that the extension of ‘(temporally) present men’ and ‘men who exist’ could change so that some men could be in the present while no longer existing? Or so that some men could exist while no longer being in the present?

Absolutely not. Presentism implies that every present man exists, and every existing man is present. 

How Far Will the Left Go?

Trump delivers and the Left loses its mind.  Victor Davis Hanson:

The economy is growing at rates that we have not seen in over a decade. Unemployment, especially minority joblessness, is at a historic low. Even The stock market is at record highs. The United States is now the world’s largest producer of oil, natural gas, and coal. Consumer and business confidence is at a near all-time high.

NATO is re-calibrating its military contributions to increase defense spending. North Korea has stopped talking about nuking our West Coast. The Iranian theocracy is panicking after the end of the Iran Deal. There have not been any incidents this year of Iranian hazing of U.S. ships. China is scrambling to find ways to readjust its lopsided trade surpluses induced by commercial cheating and dumping. Never has a Republican president appointed and had confirmed more conservative and stellar judges. The National Security team of Pompeo, Bolton, Mattis, and Haley is perhaps the most skilled since World War II.

Why then the hate, the furor, the sheer mania?

Hanson's answer.

The Logic of the Incarnation: Response to Fr. Kirby

I presented the following argument in a response to Dr. Vito Caiati:

a. The Second Person of the Trinity and the man Jesus differ property-wise.  
b.  Necessarily, for any x, y, if x, y differ property-wise, i.e., differ in respect of even one property, then x, y are numerically different, i.e., not numerically identical.  (Indiscernibility of Identicals)
Therefore
c. The Second Person of the Trinity and Jesus are not numerically identical, i.e., are not one and the same.

I went on to say that the argument is valid and the premises are true.

(a) is true as a matter of orthodox — miniscule 'o' — Christian teaching.  (b) is the Indiscernibility of Identicals, a principle whose intellectual luminosity is as great as any.  But the conclusion contradicts orthodox Christian teaching according to which God, or rather the Second Person of the Trinity, became man, i.e., became identical to a flesh and blood man with a body and a soul, in Jesus of Nazareth at a particular time in an obscure outpost of the Roman empire.

Yesterday morning's mail brought a formidable response from Down Under by Fr. Matthew Kirby:

You posit as a purportedly orthodox premise in a recent post: "The Second Person of the Trinity and the man Jesus differ property-wise."

However, this is not orthodox, but implicitly Nestorian if taken strictly literally. To put it simply, it assays to distinguish between two personal subjects, the SPT and Jesus, in terms of their properties, but the unity and identity of subject is in fact the dogmatic requirement. It is equivalent to unity of the Person. Putting the word "man" in front of Jesus does not change this, because the man Jesus is in fact the person Jesus who has two natures, divine and human. Jesus is not the name of a nature, of that Person's manhood, it is a proper name belonging to the Person as a whole, on orthodox premises. If you want to change the second "subject" to "Jesus' humanity only", then you will be comparing a Person to an ontological component of that same person, and would only "differ" in the way a subset differs from that set of which it is a subset. (This talk of components does not contradict Divine Simplicity because that simplicity refers to the Divine Nature only.) The SPT has the property of, for example, physical extension, via his human nature,  but not via his divine nature. But he really possesses that property, in precisely that sense.

Fr. Kirby clearly knows his theology.  I write these weblog entries quickly and I unaccountably blundered by saying that (a) is orthodox Christian teaching. The premise is nonetheless defensible, though surely not anything an orthodox Christian would say in explanation of his doctrine.   I won't insist on the truth of premise (a), however, but approach the question from a different angle.  Putting myself on Kirby's ground, I grant that "the unity and identity of subject is in fact the dogmatic requirement." 

On classical Christology, as defined at the Council of Chalcedon in anno domini 451, Christ is one person with two distinct natures, a divine nature and a human nature.   Thus Christ is fully divine and fully human. But isn't this just logically impossible inasmuch as it entails a contradiction?  If Christ is divine, then he is immaterial; but if he is human, then he is material.  So one and the same person is both material and not material.

Again, if Christ is divine, then he is a necessary being; but if he is human, then he is a contingent being.  So one and the same person is both necessary and not necessary.  Furthermore, if Christ is divine, and everything divine is impassible, then Christ is impassible; but surely no human being is impassible. So if Christ is human, then Christ is not impassible. The upshot, once again, is a contradiction: Christ is impassible and Christ is not impassible.

One way to try to evade these sorts of objection is by way of reduplicative constructions.  Instead of saying that Christ is both all-powerful and not all-powerful, which is a bare-faced contradiction, one could say that Christ qua God is all-powerful, but Christ qua man is not all-powerful. But does this really help? There is still only one subject, one person, one hypostasis, one suppositum,  that has contradictory attributes.  

For it is not the divine nature that has the property of being all-powerful, and it is not the human nature that has the property of being limited in power, but the bearer of these natures.  The bearer of a nature is obviously distinct from nature whose bearer it is. So the bearer of these two natures is both unlimited in power and limited in power, which is a contradiction.

Here is an analogy to help you see my point. Suppose we have a sphere the northern hemisphere of which is green, and the southern hemisphere of which is red, hence non-green.  Is such a sphere logically possible? Of course. There is no violation of the Law of Non-Contradiction, the central principle of the discursive intellect (whether or not it is the central principle of all reality.)   This is because the predicates 'green' and 'red' do not attach to one and the same item, the sphere, but to two different mutually exclusive proper parts of the sphere, the northern and southern hemispheres respectively.

But Christ, or rather Christ as depicted in Chalcedonian orthodoxy, is not like the sphere that is both green and red.  The northern and southern hemispheres instantiate being green and being red, respectively. But the divine and human natures of Christ  do not instantiate the properties of being unlimited in power and limited in power, respectively.  It is Christ himself who instantiates the properties. But then the contradiction is upon us.

So as I see it the reduplicative strategy doesn't work. It is that strategy that Fr. Kirby relies on when he writes, "The SPT has the property of, for example, physical extension, via his human nature,  but not via his divine nature." This is equivalent to saying that the Second Person is physically extended qua human, but not physically extended qua divine.  But that boils down to saying that the Second Person is physically extended and not physically extended.  

This is because a mark of a nature is not a property of that nature but a property of the subject that bears the nature.  Human nature, for example, includes the mark being an animal.  This mark is included within human nature but is not a property of human nature, and this for the simple reason that no nature is an animal. Socrates is an animal, but his nature is not.  

Now Christ is said to have two natures.  Human nature includes among its marks being susceptible to suffering, and divine nature  includes among its marks being insusceptible to suffering. Since the bearer (subject) of a nature has the marks included in its nature(s), it follows that Christ is both susceptible to suffering and insusceptible to suffering.  And that is a contradiction.

Fr. Kirby also writes,

It is thus orthodox to call Mary the Mother of God (even though she was only the source of Jesus' humanity and only physically enclosed in her womb the human nature) and say God died on the Cross (even though the Divine Nature is absolutely impassible and immortal and only God the Son's humanity could be killed.) Why? Because motherhood is an inter-personal relation, and because all of Christ's human actions are personal acts of a Divine (as well as human) Subject. 

Mariology is fascinating but I won't comment on that now. But if Christ is (identically) God the Son, and Christ died on the Cross, then God the Son died on the Cross. But no divine being can literally die, and God the Son is a divine being.  It follows that Christ is not God the Son.

Fr. Kirby will resist the conclusion by saying  that it was not God the Son who died on the Cross, but God the Son's humanity or human nature.  But by my lights this make no sense.  A flesh and blood human being died, not the nature of a human being.  It makes no sense to say that a nature lives or dies, breathes or sheds blood.

"But what if the nature is identical to its bearer?"  That is ruled out in this case because Christ has two distinct natures.  Now if N1 is not identical to N2, then neither can be identical to their common bearer B.  For if N1 = B, and N2 = B, then N1 = N2, contrary to hypothesis.

From here the dialectic plunges deeper and deeper into the connundra and obscurities of Aristotelian metaphysics, but it is time to punch the clock.

Concluding Aporetic Postscript

I should note that I have not refuted the Incarnation; at best I have given good reasons for doubting the logical coherence of a certain dogmatic conceptualization of the Incarnation.  Maybe there is an alternative conceptualization that fares better; or maybe we should go mysterian.

And You are Still a Democrat?

This is addressed to those of you old enough to remember the Kennedy administration who are still Democrats. What the hell is wrong with you? Are you attached to a mere label when that to which the label was attached has evaporated entirely?  Are you bent on proving that there is no fool like an old fool? Get with it! You're living in the past!

Dems then and now