The phenomenal Edward Feser. How does he do it? He teaches an outrageous number of courses at a community college; he has written numerous books; he gives talks and speeches, and last time I checked he has six children. Not to mention his weblog which is bare of fluff and filler and of consistently high quality, as witness his second in a series on sex. It concludes:
So just what is the deal with sex, anyway?Why are we so prone to extremes where it is concerned? The reason, I would say, has to do with our highly unusual place in the order of things. Angels are incorporeal and asexual, creatures of pure intellect. Non-human animals are entirely bodily, never rising above sensation and appetite, and our closest animal relatives reproduce sexually. Human beings, as rational animals, straddle this divide, having as it were one foot in the angelic realm and the other in the animal realm. And that is, metaphysically, simply a very odd position to be in. It is just barely stable, and sex makes it especially difficult to maintain. The unique intensity of sexual pleasure and desire, and our bodily incompleteness qua men and women, continually remind us of our corporeal and animal nature, pulling us “downward” as it were. Meanwhile our rationality continually seeks to assert its control and pull us back “upward,” and naturally resents the unruliness of such intense desire. This conflict is so exhausting that we tend to try to get out of it by jumping either to one side of the divide or the other. But this is an impossible task and the result is that we are continually frustrated. And the supernatural divine assistance that would have remedied this weakness in our nature and allowed us to maintain an easy harmony between rationality and animality was lost in original sin.
So, behaviorally, we have a tendency to fall either into prudery or into sexual excess. And intellectually, we have a tendency to fall either into the error of Platonism — treating man as essentially incorporeal, a soul trapped in the prison of the body — or into the opposite error of materialism, treating human nature as entirely reducible to the corporeal. The dominance of Platonism in early Christian thought is perhaps the main reason for its sometimes excessively negative attitude toward sexual pleasure, and the dominance of materialism in modern times is one reason for its excessive laxity in matters of sex. The right balance is, of course, the Aristotelian-Thomistic position — specifically, Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophical anthropology, which affirms that man is a single substance with both corporeal and incorporeal activities; and Aristotelian-Thomistic natural law theory, which upholds traditional sexual morality while affirming the essential goodness of sex and sexual pleasure.
A reader sent me an argument expressed in an idiosyncratic and unnecessarily technical terminology. But his idea is a very interesting one. I'll present and then evaluate my version of the reader's argument.
1. There are several actual and many possible positions on the nature and existence of God. Call them God-positions. One who occupies a God-position takes a stand on the existence of God, yes or no.
2. All but one of these God-positions are theistic: they affirm the existence of God, though they differ as to the divine attributes.
3. Only one of these God-positions is atheistic: only one affirms the nonexistence of God.
4. Exactly one of these God-positions is true.
Therefore
5. The probability that one of the many theistic God-positions is true is much greater than the probability that the one atheistic God-position is true.
Therefore
6. The claim that God exists is much more likely to be true than the claim that God does not exist.
I should think that the first three premises need no support: they are well-nigh self-evident. If support is wanted for (4), it can be found in logic. By Bivalence, there are exactly two truth-values. By Excluded Middle, every proposition is either true or not true.
But how is (5) supposed to follow from (1)-(4)? Here is where I think the problem lies. Intuitively, (5) does not follow from the premises.
Consider a parody argument. There are several actual and many possible positions on the nature and existence of the Lost Dutchman Goldmine. All but one of these LDM-positions are affirmative of the mine's existence; the remaining one is negative. But only one LDM-position is true. Therefore, it is more likely than not that the LDM exists.
This is obviously a fallacious argument. If it is, then so is the original argument. But this leaves us with the task of explaining why both are fallacious. This is not so easy.
Either the LDM exists or it does not. At most, these contradictory propositions are equiprobable. (Given my knowledge of the geology of the Superstition Wilderness, I would deny that these propositions are equiprobable; but let's assume that they are.) The number of different conceptions of the LDM has no bearing on the probability of its existence. One cannot raise (lower) the probability of the mine's existence by adding to (subtracting from) the conceptions of the LDM. Why not? Well, if the mine exists, then exactly one of the conceptions is instantiated, and all the other conceptions are uninstantiated. And it seems obviously true that the probability of some concept's being instantiated does not vary with the number of similar concepts that might have been instantiated instead.
The same goes for God even if the existence and nonexistence of God are equiprobable. There are many different conceptions of God even within a broadly Abrahamic ambit. On one conception, God is triune and simple; on another, triune but not simple; on a third, simple but not triune. And so it goes. Some hold God to be absolutely unlimited in power; others hold that logic limits God's power. And so on. Each of these conceptions is such that, if it is instantiated, then God exists. But surely the number of God-conceptions has no bearing on the probability of one of them being instantiated.
A review by Thomas F. Madden of Jonathan Riley-Smith, The Crusades, Christianity, and Islam. Some excerpts (bolding added):
It is generally thought that Christians attacked Muslims without provocation to seize their lands and forcibly convert them. The Crusaders were Europe’s lacklands and ne’er-do-wells, who marched against the infidels out of blind zealotry and a desire for booty and land. As such, the Crusades betrayed Christianity itself. They transformed “turn the other cheek” into “kill them all; God will know his own.”
Every word of this is wrong. Historians of the Crusades have long known that it is wrong, but they find it extraordinarily difficult to be heard across a chasm of entrenched preconceptions. For on the other side is, as Riley-Smith puts it “nearly everyone else, from leading churchmen and scholars in other fields to the general public.” There is the great Sir Steven Runciman, whose three-volume History of the Crusades is still a brisk seller for Cambridge University Press a half century after its release. It was Runciman who called the Crusades “a long act of intolerance in the name of God, which is a sin against the Holy Ghost.” The pity of it is that Runciman and the other popular writers simply write better stories than the professional historians.
[. . .]
St. Paul said of secular authorities, “He does not bear the sword in vain; he is the servant of God to execute his wrath on the wrongdoer.” Several centuries later, St. Augustine articulated a Christian approach to just war, one in which legitimate authorities could use violence to halt or avert a greater evil. It must be a defensive war, in reaction to an act of aggression. For Christians, therefore, violence was ethically neutral, since it could be employed either for evil or against it. As Riley-Smith notes, the concept that violence is intrinsically evil belongs solely to the modern world. It is not Christian.
All the Crusades met the criteria of just wars. They came about in reaction attacks against Christians or their Church. The First Crusade was called in 1095 in response to the recent Turkish conquest of Christian Asia Minor, as well as the much earlier Arab conquest of the Christian-held Holy Land. The second was called in response to the Muslim conquest of Edessa in 1144. The third was called in response to the Muslim conquest of Jerusalem and most other Christian lands in the Levant in 1187.
[. . .]
And yet, so ingrained is this notion that the Crusades began the modern European assault on Islam that many moderate Muslims still believe it. Riley-Smith recounts : “I recently refused to take part in a television series, produced by an intelligent and well-educated Egyptian woman, for whom a continuing Western crusade was an article of faith. Having less to do with historical reality than with reactions to imperialism, the nationalist and Islamist interpretations of crusade history help many people, moderates as well as extremists, to place the exploitation they believe they have suffered in a historical context and to satisfy their feelings of both superiority and humiliation.”
In the Middle East, as in the West, we are left with the gaping chasm between myth and reality. Crusade historians sometimes try to yell across it but usually just talk to each other, while the leading churchmen, the scholars in other fields, and the general public hold to a caricature of the Crusades created by a pox of modern ideologies. If that chasm is ever to be bridged, it will be with well-written and powerful books such as this.
In the three and a half decades since the Iranian revolution, I have been watching my friends and neighbors (and distant neighbors) on the left struggling to understand—or avoid understanding—the revival of religion in what is now called a “post-secular” age. Long ago, we looked forward to “the disenchantment of the world”—we believed that the triumph of science and secularism was a necessary feature of modernity. And so we forgot, as Nick Cohen has written, “what the men and women of the Enlightenment knew. All faiths in their extreme form carry the possibility of tyranny.”1
BV: Two comments.
First, what might the triumph of science be if not the triumph of scientism, which is not science, but a philosophical view according to which the only genuine knowledge is natural-scientific knowledge? (I provide plenty of nuance as to the definition of 'scientism' in my Scientism category.) After all, if science triumphs, it triumphs over something, and what would that be? If you say 'religion,' then I will point out that science and religion are not in the same line of work and so not in competition; hence science cannot triumph over religion any more than religion can triumph over science. But scientism can triumph over religion because scientism and religions are worldviews. Scientism is logically incompatible with religion; this is particularly clear in the case of theistic religions. Scientism is the epistemology of naturalism, the ontological doctrine that reality is exhausted by the space-time system and its contents. If naturalism is true, then of course there is no God, and contrapositively: if there is a God, then naturalism is false. But there is nothing in science that rules out the existence of God. If you think there is, then you are confusing science with scientism.
Second, while it is true that most if not all religions in their extreme forms carry the possibility of tyranny, this is also true of non- and anti-religious ideologies such as communism. If one fails to point this out, as Walzer does fail to point it out, then then one can be suspected of a lack of intellectual honesty. Communist tyranny alone led to the deaths of upwards of 100 million in the 20th century.
Today, every major world religion is experiencing a significant revival, and revived religion isn’t an opiate as we once thought, but a very strong stimulant. Since the late 1970s, and particularly in the last decade, this stimulant is working most powerfully in the Islamic world. From Pakistan to Nigeria, and in parts of Europe, too, Islam today is a religion capable of inspiring large numbers of men and women, mostly men, to kill and die on its behalf. So the Islamic revival is a kind of testing moment for the left: can we recognize and resist “the possibility of tyranny?” Some of us are trying to meet the test; many of us are actively failing it. One reason for this failure is the terrible fear of being called “Islamophobic.” Anti-Americanism and a radical version of cultural relativism also play an important part, but these are older pathologies. Here is something new: many leftists are so irrationally afraid of an irrational fear of Islam that they haven’t been able to consider the very good reasons for fearing Islamist zealots—and so they have difficulty explaining what’s going on in the world.
My main evidentiary basis for this claim is the amazingly long list of links that comes up when you Google “Islamophobia.” Many of them are phobic; I focus on the anti-phobic links, and so I have entered the online world of the left. It is a large and exciting world, highly diverse, inhabited mostly by people new to me. It’s also a little disheartening, because many of the pathologies of the extra-internet left haven’t disappeared online. Obviously, there is no left collective, on or off the internet, but the people I am writing about constitute a significant leftist coterie, and none of them are worrying enough about the politics of contemporary religion or about radical Islamist politics.
For myself, I live with a generalized fear of every form of religious militancy. I am afraid of Hindutva zealots in India, of messianic Zionists in Israel, and of rampaging Buddhist monks in Myanmar. But I admit that I am most afraid of Islamist zealots because the Islamic world at this moment in time (not always, not forever) is especially feverish and fervent. Indeed, the politically engaged Islamist zealots can best be understood as today’s crusaders.
BV: I wonder if Walzer's fear extends to every form of ideological militancy, including anti-religious militancy such as communist militancy. If not, why not? If not, why the double standard?
Walzer needs to be reminded that we conservatives also harbor a rational fear, a fear of leftists who have no problem with using the awesome power of the state to destroy the liberties of individuals.
There is also a distinction that needs to be made and I don't see Walzer making it. It is the difference between 'rampaging,' say, because your religion enjoins such behavior and 'rampaging' in defense of your life and livelihood and religion. Islamic doctrine enjoins violent jihad; there is no Buddhist equivalent. This distinction at the level of doctrine is crucial and must not be ignored. Doctrine is not mere verbiage; doctrine is at the root of action.
Walzer is equivocating on 'religious militancy.' If some Buddhist monks go on a rampage, then, that could be called religious militancy, but not in the same sense in which Muslim destroyers of Buddhist statuary or Muslim beheaders of Christians are religiously militant. For in the latter case the militancy flows from the tenets of their religion — which is not the case in Buddhism.
Can Islamist zealots best be understood as today's crusaders? Hardly. For one thing, this ignores the fact that the Crusades were a response to Islamic jihad.
[. . .]
The Christian Crusades have sometimes been described as the first example of Islamophobia in the history of the West. The crusaders were driven by an irrational fear of Islam.
This is absurd. The Crusades were a defensive response to a Muslim land-grab. If someone grabs your land, is your fear of that party irrational? There is no point in going on with this. While Walzer is not a bad as the typical leftist loon, he has already made enough mistakes to justify my wishing him a fond fare well.
Here. (Link via Frank Beckwith's FB page. Interesting how many conservatives are Dylan fans. Lawrence Auster is another.)
It is a fascinating, rich speech by a living repository of musical Americana and without a doubt the most creative interpreter of our musical legacy, the "bard of our generation" as Auster puts it. One is moved by the gratitude and generosity Dylan displays toward the many people over the years who helped him and believed in him, but slightly put off by his digs at his detractors. He seems to think he has been uniquely singled out for criticism. "Why me, Lord?"
As I said, a very rich speech. But every Dylanologist knows that nothing Dylan says about himself or his music should be taken too seriously. He is a master of many personae and the man himself likes to hide. As he puts it in The Man in Me:
The man in me will hide sometimes to keep from being seen But that's just because he doesn't want to turn into some machine.
The best documentation of Dylan the shape shifter and one of the best all-around books on Dylan is David Dalton, Who is That Man? In Search of the Real Bob Dylan (Hyperion, 2012). If you were 'in there' with him in the heart of '60s you will delight in this well-written volume.
The speech ends on this note:
I'm going to get out of here now. I'm going to put an egg in my shoe and beat it. I probably left out a lot of people and said too much about some. But that's OK. Like the spiritual song, 'I'm still just crossing over Jordan too.' Let's hope we meet again. Sometime. And we will, if, like Hank Williams said, "the good Lord willing and the creek don't rise."
High Water comes to mind. This is a late-career Dylan gem from Love and Theft (2001). A tribute to Charley Patton. Demonstrates Dylan's mastery of the arcana of Americana. Our greatest and deepest singer-songwriter.
I got a cravin’ love for blazing speed, got a hopped-up Mustang Ford, jump into the wagon, love, throw your panties overboard. I can write you poems, make a strong man lose his mind, I’m no pig without a wig, I hope you treat me kind, things are breakin’ up out there, high water everywhere.
My favorite verse:
Well, George Lewis told the Englishman, the Italian and the Jew You can't open up your mind, boys, to every conceivable point of view They got Charles Darwin trapped out there on Highway 5 Judge says to the High Sheriff, "I want them dead or alive" Either one, I don't care, high water everywhere.
Nosiree, Bob, you can't open up your mind to every conceivable point of view, especially when its not dark yet, but it's getting there.
We Americans are forward-looking people, 'progressives' if you will. ("History is bunk," said Henry Ford.) Muslims, by contrast, live in the past where they nurture centuries-old grievances. This is part of the explanation of the inanition of their culture and the misery of their lands, which fact is part of the explanation of why they won't stay where they are but insist on infiltrating the West. Exercised as they remain over the Crusades, lo these many centuries later, it behooves us to inform ourselves of the historical facts. This is especially important in light of President Obama's recent foolish, unserious, and mendacious comments.
Herewith, then, a piece from someone who knows what he is talking about. I copied it from this location.
Jihad vs. Crusade
Bernard Lewis/Wall Street Journal, Sept. 28, 2001
U.S. President George W. Bush's use of the term "crusade" in calling for a powerful joint effort against terrorism was unfortunate, but excusable. In Western usage, this word has long since lost its original meaning of "a war for the cross," and many are probably unaware that this is the derivation of the name. At present, "crusade" almost always means simply a vigorous campaign for a good cause. This cause may be political or military, though this is rare; more commonly, it is social, moral or environmental. In modern Western usage it is rarely if ever religious.
Yet "crusade" still touches a raw nerve in the Middle East, where the Crusades are seen and presented as early medieval precursors of European imperialism — aggressive, expansionist and predatory. I have no wish to defend or excuse the often-atrocious behavior of the crusaders, both in their countries of origin and in the countries they invaded, but the imperialist parallel is highly misleading. The Crusades could more accurately be described as a limited, belated and, in the last analysis, ineffectual response to the jihad — a failed attempt to recover by a Christian holy war what had been lost to a Muslim holy war.
At the time of the Crusades, when the Holy Land and some adjoining regions in Syria were conquered and for a while ruled by invaders from Europe, there seems to have been little awareness among Muslims of the nature of the movement that had brought the Europeans to the region. The crusaders established principalities in the Levant, which soon fitted into the pattern of Levantine regional politics. Even the crusader capture of Jerusalem aroused little attention at the time, and appeals for help to various Muslim capitals brought no response.
The real countercrusade began when the crusaders — very foolishly — began to harry and attack the Muslim holy lands, namely the Hijaz in Arabia, containing the holy cities of Mecca and Medina where Muhammad was born, carried out his mission, and died. In the vast Arabic historiography of the Crusades period, there is frequent reference to these invaders, who are always called "Franks" or "infidels." The words "Crusade" and "crusader" simply do not occur.
They begin to occur with increasing frequency in the 19th century, among modernized Arabic writers, as they became aware of Western historiography in Western languages. By now they are in common use. It is surely significant that Osama bin Laden, in his declaration of jihad against the United States, refers to the Americans as "crusaders" and lists their presence in Arabia as their first and primary offense. Their second offense is their use of Arabia as a base for their attack on Iraq. The issue of Jerusalem and support for "the petty state of the Jews" come third.
The literal meaning of the Arabic word "jihad" is striving, and its common use derives from the Quranic phrase "striving in the path of God." Some Muslims, particularly in modern times, have interpreted the duty of jihad in a spiritual and moral sense. The more common interpretation, and that of the overwhelming majority of the classical jurists and commentators, presents jihad as armed struggle for Islam against infidels and apostates. Unlike "crusade," it has retained its religious and military connotation into modern times.
Being a religious obligation, jihad is elaborately regulated in sharia law, which discusses in minute detail such matters as the opening, conduct, interruption and cessation of hostilities, the treatment of prisoners and noncombatants, the use of weapons, etc. In an offensive war, jihad is a collective obligation of the entire community, and may therefore be discharged by volunteers and professionals. In a defensive war, it is an individual obligation of every able-bodied Muslim.
In his declaration of 1998, Osama bin Laden specifically invokes this rule: "For more than seven years the United States is occupying the lands of Islam in the holiest of its territories, Arabia, plundering its riches, overwhelming its rulers, humiliating its people, threatening its neighbors, and using its bases in the peninsula as a spearhead to fight against the neighboring Islamic peoples." In view of this, "to kill Americans and their allies, both civil and military, is an individual duty of every Muslim who can, in any country where this is possible, until the Aqsa mosque and the Haram mosque are freed from their grip, and until their armies, shattered and broken-winged, depart from all the lands of Islam, incapable of threatening any Muslim."
Muhammad himself led the first jihad, in the wars of the Muslims against the pagans in Arabia. The jihad continued under his successors, with a series of wars that brought the Middle East, including the Holy Land, under Arab Muslim rule and then continued eastward into Asia, westward into Africa, and three times into Europe — the Moors in Spain, the Tatars in Russia, the Turks in the Balkans. The Crusade was part of the European counterattack. The Christian reconquest succeeded in Spain, Russia and eventually the Balkans; it failed to recover the Holy Land of Christendom.
In Islamic usage the term martyrdom is normally interpreted to mean death in a jihad, and the reward is eternal bliss, described in some detail in early religious texts. Suicide is another matter.
Classical Islam in all its different forms and versions has never permitted suicide. This is seen as a mortal sin, and brings eternal punishment in the form of the unending repetition of the act by which the suicide killed himself. The classical jurists, in discussing the laws of war, distinguish clearly between a soldier who faces certain death at the hands of the enemy, and one who kills himself by his own hand. The first goes to heaven, the other to hell. In recent years, some jurists and scholars have blurred this distinction, and promised the joys of paradise to the suicide bomber. Others retain the more traditional view that suicide in any form is totally forbidden.
Similarly, the laws of jihad categorically preclude wanton and indiscriminate slaughter. The warriors in the holy war are urged not to harm noncombatants, women and children, "unless they attack you first." Even such questions as missile and chemical warfare are addressed, the first in relation to mangonels and catapults, the other to the use of poison-tipped arrows and poisoning enemy water supplies. Here the jurists differ — some permit, some restrict, some forbid these forms of warfare. A point on which they insist is the need for a clear declaration of war before beginning hostilities, and for proper warning before resuming hostilities after a truce.
What the classical jurists of Islam never remotely considered is the kind of unprovoked, unannounced mass slaughter of uninvolved civil populations that we saw in New York two weeks ago. For this there is no precedent and no authority in Islam. Indeed it is difficult to find precedents even in the rich annals of human wickedness.
—
Mr. Lewis is professor emeritus of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University.
So boys don't you start your ramblin' around/ On this road of sin are you sorrow bound/ Take my advice or you'll curse the day/ You started rollin' down that lost highway.
Perhaps you noticed this too. President Obama refuses to use 'Islamic' in connection with the Islamic State or 'Muslim' in connection with Muslim terrorists. But he has no problem with pinning the deeds of crusaders and inquisitors on Christians. This is a double standard.
Surely, if no true Muslim beheads journalists or crucifies children, then no true Christian commits deeds of equal moral depravity.
A while back Obama made the surprising statement that "ISIL is not Islamic." What was the reasoning behind Obama's statement? Perhaps this:
1. All religions are good. 2. Islam is a religion. Ergo 3. Islam is good. 4. ISIL is not good. Ergo 5. ISIL is not Islamic.
But then, by parity of reasoning,
1. All religions are good. 2*. Christianity is a religion. Ergo 3*. Christianity is good. 4*. The Crusades/Inquisition were not good. Ergo 5*. The Crusades/Inquisition were not Christian.
But far worse than Obama's double standard is his profound historical ignorance which any number of commentators have exposed, John Hinderaker, for example.
This is a revised post from September, 2009. Thanks to V.V. for his interest.
……………….
A great deal could be said on this topic. Here are a few thoughts that may be helpful. Test them against your own experience.
1. Make good use of the morning, which is an excellent time for such activities as reading, writing, study, and meditation. But to put the morning to good use, one must arise early. I get up at 2:00, but you needn't be so monkish. Try arising one or two hours earlier than you presently do. That will provide you with a block of quiet time. Fruitful mornings are of course impossible if one's evenings are spent dissipating. But it is not enough to avoid dissipation. One ought to organize one's evening so as to set oneself up for a fruitful morning's work. Alphonse Gratry makes some excellent suggestions in section V of his "The Sources of Intellectual Light" (1862), the last book of his Logic (trs. Helen and Milton Singer, Open Court, 1944). One of them is, "Set yourself questions in the evening; very often you will find them resolved when you awaken in the morning." (532) Gratry has in mind theoretical problems. His advice is compatible with Schopenhauer's: One should never think about personal problems, money woes, and other such troubles at night and certainly not before bed.
2. Abstain from all mass media dreck in the morning. Read no newspapers. "Read not The Times, read the eternities." (Thoreau) No electronics. No computer use, telephony, TV, e-mail, etc. Just as you wouldn't pollute your body with whisky and cigarettes upon arising, so too you ought not pollute your pristine morning mind with the irritant dust of useless facts, the palaver of groundless opinions, the bad writing of contemporary scribblers, and every manner of distraction. There is time for that stuff later in the day if you must have it. The mornings should be kept free and clear for study that promises long-term profit.
3. Although desultory reading is enjoyable, it is best to have a plan. Pick one or a small number of topics that strike you as interesting and important and focus on them. I distinguish between bed reading and desk reading. Such lighter reading as biography and history can be done in bed, but hard-core materials require a desk and such other accessories as pens of various colors for different sorts of annotations and underlinings, notebooks, a cup of coffee, a pot of coffee . . . .
4. If you read books of lasting value, you ought to study what you read, and if you study, you ought to take notes. And if you take notes, you owe it to yourself to assemble them into some sort of coherent commentary. What is the point of studious reading if not to evaluate critically what you read, assimilating the good while rejecting the bad? The forming of the mind is the name of the game. This won't occur from passive reading, but only by an active engagement with the material. The best way to do this is by writing up your own take on it. Here is where blogging can be useful. Since blog posts are made public, your self-respect will give you an incentive to work at saying something intelligent.
5. An illustration. Right now I have about a half-dozen projects going. One is an article for publication in a professional journal on the philosophy of Milton K. Munitz. What I have been doing very early in the morning is studying and taking notes on four of his books that are relevant to my project. I write these notes and quotations and criticisms into a journal the old-fashioned way. Like I said, no electronics early in the morning. Computer is off and internet connection as well. This eliminates the temptation to check e-mail, follow hyperlinks, and waste time. Later in the day I incorporate these hand-written notes into a long blog post I am writing. When that post is finished and published and I receive some comments, I will then write up the post as a formal article and send it to a journal.
The beauty of this is that one has something to show for the hours spent studying. One has a finished product in which one's thoughts are organized and preserved and to which one can refer later.
6. How keep track of a vast amount of resources? A weblog can be useful as an on-line filing cabinet. I also keep a daily journal.
But the West is in grave danger. Attacked from without, she is also collapsing from within under the weight of her own decadence. Can we and it survive? The short answer is that, while we are running on fumes, they are rich and voluminous and long-lasting. It will take some time before they and we peter out. So there is still time to take action. Decline is not inevitable. But do we have the will?
I suggested earlier that we think of abbreviations as a genus that splits into three coordinate species: acronyms, initialisms, and truncations with the specific differences as follows:
An acronym is a pronounceable word formed from either the initial letters of two or more words, or from contiguous letters of two or more words. For example, 'laser' is a pronounceable word formed from the initial letters of the following words: light, amplification, stimulated, emission, radiation. And Gestapo is a pronounceable word formed from contiguous letters of the following words: geheime, Staats, Polizei.
An initialism is a string of contiguous letters, unpronounceable as a word or else not in use as a word, but pronounceable as a list of letters, formed from the initial letters of two or more words. For example, 'PBS' is an initialism that abbreviates 'Public Broadcasting System.' 'PBS' cannot be pronounced as a word, but it can be pronounced as a series of letters: Pee, Bee, Ess. 'IT' is an initialism that abbreviates "information technology.' In this case 'IT' is pronounceable as a word, but is not in use as a word. You can say, 'Mary works in Eye-Tee,' but not, 'Mary works in IT.' The same goes for 'ASU' which abbreviates 'Arizona State University.'
A truncation is a term formed from a single word by shortening it. 'App,' for example is a truncation of 'application,' and 'ho' is presumably a truncation of 'whore' (in black idiom). 'Auto' is a truncation of 'automobile,' and 'blog' (noun) of 'weblog.'
Malcolm Chisholm in an e-mail comment objects to my taxonomy, claiming that the classification looks like this:
While my scheme probably has defects of which I am not aware, Dr. Chisholm's scheme is open to objection. He tells us that a truncation is "formed by taking the first part of each word." But then 'laser' and Gestapo are truncations, which can't be right. There is no word of which 'laser' is the truncation as there is a word of which 'hood' is the truncation ('neighborhood'). Chisholm also tells us that an acronym is "formed by taking the first letter of each word." But Gestapo and Stasi are not formed by taking the first letter of each word. Stasi is formed from the first three letters of Staat and the first two letters of Sicherheit. (By the way, the Stasi was much worse than the Gestapo, according to Simon Wiesenthal.) And what about 'sonar'? It takes two letters from 'sound' and one each from 'navigation' and 'ranging.'
What's more, I see no point in making acronym superordinate to pronounceable acronym. That strikes me as a distinction without a difference, i.e., a merely verbal distinction. As I see it, 'pronounceable acronym' is a pleonastic expression. But I will irenically grant that there may be no fact of the matter here and that we can slice this bird in equally acceptable ways. Those who classify the initialism 'SBNR' ('spiritual but not religious') — the initialism that got me on this jag in the first place — as an acronym are free to do so. But I prefer not to since every example of an acronym I can think of is pronounceable.
Perhaps I can appeal to parsimony. My scheme is simpler than Chisholm's. His Porphyric tree sports three branchings; mine only two.
But perhaps I am making some mistake here. What is wrong with my taxonomy if anything is wrong with it? But I'm no linguist; I'm merely a philosopher who thinks it wise to attend carefully to ordinary language while avoiding the aberration known as Ordinary Language philosophy.
Old Ed pulls no punches. In response to Peter Singer's claim that "sex raises no unique moral issues at all," Feser remarks, "I have long regarded this as one of the most imbecilic things any philosopher has ever said." I agree. Feser goes on to make a number of important points.
This from a graduate student whose paper I posted:
Shortly after you posted my paper, I got an email from a friend who also reads your blog. My friend wondered if this was, all things considered, bad for my chances on the job market. He thinks in this age of Google searches, having my name come up on your blog will be viewed negatively by some hiring committees, given that most are leftists. It is completely absurd to me that someone might chuck my application in the trash just because they see a serious metaphysics post on a blog that defends conservative views some of the time, and I'm quite happy to have my name associated with yours, but I was wondering what you thought.
Might it be better to change the post and title a little so it doesn't mention my full name? If it is indeed true that some departments would not hire me because of this post, there is a significant part of me that doesn't want to work with such people anyway, but then there is another part of me that loves teaching philosophy enough that I'd be willing to try to put up with such people, at least for a while. I don't know. I'm not terribly worried about it at this moment, since I won't be on the job market until fall of 2016.
I did remove the author's name out of concern for his prospects. I suspect his friend has a better understanding of how bad things have become than he does. The universities have become leftist seminaries. The few exceptions prove the rule. And where there are leftists there is political correctness and the party line. Anyone who refuses to toe it, anyone who thinks independently and critically and speaks out against leftist excesses and outright inanities runs a serious career risk. But even if one does not speak out, and is only tenuously associated with a website that publishes some conservative material, one is at risk.
I've made mine, so I can afford to speak the truth. A little courage is involved, but not much. I cannot recommend that people who are young or starting out take career-destroying risks. And I ought not expose them to danger. Never underestimate how vicious and vindictive leftists can be. The case of Brian Leiter is very instructive. Details of some of his recent antics here.
And don't ever underestimate the lengths of lunacy to which lefties will go. Recent example: CUNY. Morris Raphael Cohen must be rolling over in his grave.
Graduate students in a philosophy department somewhere in the English-speaking world did some online sleuthing about a job candidate for a position in their department, and learned that the candidate seems to hold views they find offensive. In particular, they found reports (including alleged quotes) that the candidate had expressed in online fora the view that homosexual acts and premarital sex are immoral.
It is a good thing Immanuel Kant did not apply to this department. He holds that "Every form of sexual indulgence, except in marriage, is a misuse of sexuality and so a crimen carnis." (Lectures on Ethics, tr. Infield, Hackett, p. 169.)
Intellectual and moral growth is not less indispensable than material amelioration. Knowledge is a viaticum; thought is of primary necessity; truth is nourishment as well as wheat. A reason, by fasting from knowledge and wisdom, becomes puny. Let us lament as over stomachs, over minds which do not eat. If there is anything more poignant than a body agonizing for want of bread, it is a soul which is dying of hunger for light. (Les Miserables)
