Bill Vallicella – Page 542 – Maverick Philosopher

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The Professor-Student ‘Non-Aggression Pact’

William J. Bennett and David Wilezol, Is College Worth It? (Thomas Nelson 2013), p. 134:

Knowing that students prefer to spend more time having fun than studying, professors are more comfortable awarding good grades while requiring a minimum amount of work. In return, students give favorable personal evaluations to professors who desire to be well received by students as a condition of preserving their employment status. Indeed, the popularity of the student evaluation, which began in the 1970s, has had a pernicious effect.

I would say so. Here is an anecdote to illustrate the Bennett thesis. In early 1984 I was 'up for tenure.' And so in the '83 fall semester I was more than usually concerned about the quality of my student evaluations. One of my classes that semester was an upper-level seminar conducted in the library over a beautiful oak table. One day one of the students began carving into the beautiful table with his pen.

In an abdication of authority that part of me regrets and a part excuses, I said nothing. The student liked me and I knew it. I expected a glowing recommendation from him and feared losing it. So I held my tongue while the kid defaced university property.

Jeff H. and I had entered into a tacit 'non-aggression pact.' (And I got tenure.)

The problem is not that students are given an opportunity to comment upon and complain about their teachers. The problem is the use to which student evaluations are put for tenure, promotion, and salary 'merit-increase' decisions. My chairman at the time was an officious organization man, who would calculate student evaluation averages to one or two decimal places, and then rank department members as to their teaching effectiveness. Without getting into this too deeply for a blog post, there is something highly dubious about equating teaching effectiveness with whatever the student evaluations measure, and something absurd about the false precision of calculating averages out to one or two decimal places.

Jones is a better teacher than Smith because her average is 3.2 while his is only 3.1? Well, no, but if the chairman is asked to justify his decision, he can point to the numbers. There is mindless quantification, but it takes someone more thoughtful than an administrator to see it.

I strongly recommend the Bennett-Wilezol book to anyone thinking of attending college or thinking of bankrolling someone's attendance. Here is a review.

Memory Babe, in Big Sur, Remembers the 1959 Steve Allen Session

Sweet gone Jack really did try to be a good boy and give up the booze and dissipation and all the near occasions of sin & temptation that fame brought him once he made it in '57 with the publication of On the Road. Here he is arrived at Lawrence Ferlinghett's (Lorenzo Monsanto's) cabin in Bixby Canyon, Big Sur:

And in the flush of the first few days of joy I confidently tell myself (not expecting what I'll do in three weeks only) "no more dissipation, it's time for me to quietly watch the world and even enjoy it, first in woods like these, then just calmly walk and talk among people of the world, no booze, no drugs, no binges, no bouts with beatniks and drunks and junkies and everybody, no more I ask myself the question O why is God torturing me, that's it, be a loner, travel, talk to waiters only, in fact, in Milan, Paris, just talk to waiters, walk around, no more self-imposed agony . . . it's time to think and watch and keep concentrated on the fact that after all this whole surface of the world as we know it now will be covered with the silt of a billion years in time.. . Yay, for this, more aloneness" — "Go back to childhood, just eat apples and read your Cathechism — sit on curbstones, the hell with the hot lights of Hollywood" (remembering that awful time only a year earlier when I had to rehearse my reading of prose a third time under the hot lights of the Steve Allen Show in the Burbank studio, one hundred technicians waiting for me to start reading, Steve Allen watching me expectant as he plunks the piano, I sit there on the dunce's stool and refuse to read a word or open my mouth, "I dont have to R E H E A R S E for God's sake Steve! " — "But go ahead, we just wanta get the tone of your voice, just this last time, I'll let you off the dress rehearsal" and I sit there sweating not saying a word for a whole minute as everybody watches, finally I say, "No I cant do it, " and I go across the street to get drunk) (but surprising everybody the night of the show by doing my job of reading just fine, which surprises the producers and so they take me out with a Hollywood starlet who turns out to be a big bore trying to read me her poetry and wont talk love because in Hollywood man love is for sale)… So even that marvelous, long remembrances of life all the time in the world to just sit there or lie there or walk about slowly remembering all the details of life which now because a million lightyears away have taken on the aspect (as they must've for Proust in his sealed room) of pleasant movies brought up at will and projected for further study — And pleasure — As I imagine God to be doing this very minute, watching his own movie, which is us. (Big Sur, ch. 6, pp. 24-25)

Listen to the reading. "I wrote the book because we are all going to die."

Alexander Solzhenitsyn: Men Have Forgotten God

As the USA drifts daily farther in the direction of leftist totalitarianism, the words of Solzhenitsyn ought to be considered. Excerpt:

. . . the world had never before known a godlessness as organized, militarized, and tenaciously malevolent as that practiced by Marxism. Within the philosophical system of Marx and Lenin, and at the heart of their psychology, hatred of God is the principal driving force, more fundamental than all their political and economic pretensions. Militant atheism is not merely incidental or marginal to Communist policy; it is not a side effect, but the central pivot.

The 1920’s in the USSR witnessed an uninterrupted procession of victims and martyrs amongst the Orthodox clergy. Two metropolitans were shot, one of whom, Veniamin of Petrograd, had been elected by the popular vote of his diocese. Patriarch Tikhon himself passed through the hands of the Cheka-GPU and then died under suspicious circumstances. Scores of archbishops and bishops perished. Tens of thousands of priests, monks, and nuns, pressured by the Chekists to renounce the Word of God, were tortured, shot in cellars, sent to camps, exiled to the desolate tundra of the far North, or turned out into the streets in their old age without food or shelter. All these Christian martyrs went unswervingly to their deaths for the faith; instances of apostasy were few and far between. For tens of millions of laymen access to the Church was blocked, and they were forbidden to bring up their children in the Faith: religious parents were wrenched from their children and thrown into prison, while the children were turned from the faith by threats and lies.

Here’s to You, Jack Kerouac, on the 44th Anniversary of Your Release . . .

. . .
from the wheel of the quivering meat conception and the granting of your wish:
"The wheel of the quivering meat conception . . . . . . I wish I was free of that
slaving meat wheel and safe in heaven dead." (Mexico City Blues, 1959,
211th Chorus).

Kerouac's Mexico

Review of Kill Your Darlings

The Mexican Girl, Bea Franco, Finally Found

In 1955, The Paris Review paid a struggling Jack Kerouac fifty dollars for an excerpt from a then unpublished manuscript. The excerpt appeared as a short story titled “The Mexican Girl” and, after much acclaim, was picked up a year later by Martha Foley’s The Best American Short Stories. Due in large part to the success of “The Mexican Girl,” On the Road was soon accepted by Viking Press; the full novel was published in 1957. (reference)

Here is an audio clip of "The Mexican Girl." Meanwhile, the Mexican Girl, Bea Franco, has been found, written up, and assumes her place in the Beat pantheon.

Lest we forget, however, "Pretty girls make graves." (The Dharma Bums)

Camille Paglia on Philosophy and Women in Philosophy

Here:

The term "female philosopher" doesn't even make sense to me. Simone de Beauvoir was a thinker rather than a philosopher. A philosopher for me is someone who is removed from everyday concerns and manipulates terms and concepts like counters on a grid or chessboard. Both Simone de Beauvoir and Ayn Rand, another favourite of mine, have their own highly influential system of thought, and therefore they belong on any list of great philosophers.

This paragraph illustrates a conversational move I find very annoying. Characterizing the ploy in the abstract is not easy, but here goes. One takes a word in use and arbitrarily assigns one's own pejorative meaning to it while opposing it to some other word in the semantic vicinity of the first to which one assigns a non-pejorative meaning. Thus for Paglia 'philosopher' is a pejorative while 'thinker' is not, and no one can be both.

Simone de Beauvoir therefore cannot be a philosopher (bad!) but must be a thinker (good!). And because she cannot be a philosopher, 'female philosopher' makes no sense. Of course, the distinction is bogus, and there is no justification for Paglia's idiosyncratic re-definition of 'philosophy.'

Here is another example of the annoying move in question.

To make matters worse, Paglia, in the paragraph cited, contradicts herself. Having just gotten through telling us that de Beauvoir is not a philosopher but a thinker, she reverses course and tells us that she belongs on a list of great philosophers.

And Ayn Rand a great philosopher? Mercy!

The rest of her piece is no better than the paragraph cited.

More With Novak on the Real Distinction

I have been defending the real distinction between essence and existence in contingent beings. Lukas Novak, though not rejecting the distinction, finds my arguments wanting. Here is his latest challenge to me:

1) First I will use your own weapons against you. The following triad is
inconsistent, any two propositions entail the negation of the remaining one.
Which limb do you reject?

a) Necessarily, Socrates exists iff Socrates is a man.
b) Possibly,
Socrates does not exist.
c) Necessarily, Socrates is a man.

Yes, the triad is inconsistent. I am tempted to reject (c). Socrates is essentially a man, but not necessarily a man. In terms of possible worlds: Socrates is a man in every possible world in which he exists, but, being contingent, he does not exist in every world. So he is essentially a man but not necessarily a man. God, by contrast, is both essentially divine and necessarily divine: he is divine in every world in which he exists, and he exists in every world.

But if I reject (c), how can I claim, as I have, that while Socrates is possibly nonexistent, he is not possibly non-human? For if S. is not possibly non-human, that is equivalent to saying that he is necessarily human, which in turn is equivalent to (c).

Novak appears to have refuted my contingency argument for the real distinction.

2) When interpreting the modalities in your two sentences, one can interpret
the implicit quantifications over possible worlds as comprising either all
possible worlds, or just the possible worlds where Socrates exists at all.

Lukas is referring to the following two sentences, the first of which I claimed is true, and the second of which I claimed is false (because Socrates is essentially a man):

A. Socrates exists & Socrates is possibly such that he does not
exist.

B. Socrates is a man & Socrates is possibly such that he is not a
man.

I say that in order that (A) be true, it must be interpreted so that
"possibly" invokes quantification over all possible worlds, not just
those where Socrates exists (because there is no possible world among those in
which Socrates exists such that Socrates does not exist in that world). On the
other hand, in order that (B) be false, the quantification implicit in the
"possibly" must be restricted to those worlds only where Socrates exists.
Because it is not true that Socrates is human in worlds where he does not exist
at all. As you yourself concede, essence without existence is just nothing, so
in a world where Socrates does not have existence, he neither has his essence,
which is humanity. Thus the different modal behaviour of the sentences is merely
apparent, it is a result of your tendency to interpret the quantification
implicit in modal terms differently when speaking about existence and about
essential predicates.

Novak's very powerful objection, in effect, is that the following are both true:

A* There are possible worlds in which Socrates does not exist

B* There are possible worlds in which Socrates is not human

and that these are the same worlds. What's more, the starred sentences are the only possible readings of my (A) and (B). Since the starred sentences are both true, my contingency argument for the distinction between individual essence and existence in Socrates fails. What I had argued is that, since Socrates is possibly nonexistent, but not possibly non-human, his existing is not identical to his being an instance of humanity.

Novak's point could also be put as follows. In every possible world in which Socrates exists, he is human, and in every world in which he is human, he exists. Hence there is no world in which he has the one property but not the other. Existing and being human are therefore necessarily equivalent, equivalent across all possible worlds. If so, it is not the case that Socrates is possibly nonexistent, but not possibly non-human.

I grant the necessary equivalence, but deny that one can infer the identity of existing and being human from it. Necessary equivalence does not entail identity. Triangularity and trilaterality are necessarily equivalent but non-identical.

But this doesn't settle the matter. Lukas could agree that, in general, necessary equivalence does not entail identity, but still claim that I have not given a compelling reason for thinking that existing and being a concrete instance of humanity are non-identical. After all, he is not rejecting the real distinction, but arguing that I haven't proven it.

Despite the obvious force of Novak's argument, I think there is a way of construing 'Socrates is possibly nonexistent, but not possibly non-human' that evades the argument. Here goes.

Suppose we take 'Socrates' to refer to a concrete individual essence, one that, obviously, exists. We can say, with truth, that this essence might not have existed, that its nonexistence is possible in the sense that there is nothing in this essence to insure (entail) that it exist. But it is also true that this existing individual essence, this existing instance of humanity, could not have been anything other than an instance of humanity: it could not have been an instance of any other nature, felinity, say. The Socratic essence could not have been a feline essence. Understood in this way, it seems to me true to say that Socrates (the individual Socratic essence) is possibly nonexistent but not possibly non-human. But if it is not possibly non-human, then it is necessarily human, in which case the individual Socratic essence is to be found in every possible world.

This essence must have some ontological status, and indeed a necessary ontological status. But we have to avoid reifying it. We can say that is has a merely intentional status in those worlds in which Socrates does not exist. That is, it exists only as a divine accusative in such worlds. In such worlds the essence possesses esse intentionale but not esse reale. In those worlds in which Socrates exists, the Socratic essence posseses both esse intentionale and esse reale.

We can remove the contradiction in the original triad without hypostatizing essences by ascending to a higher viewpoint: we bring God into the picture. God is a necessary being, so all the essences that enjoy esse intentionale in his mind are necessary beings. To some of them such as the Socrates essence he superadds existence. Although it is false that, necessarily, Socrates is human, it is true that, necessarily, the Socratic individual essence includes humanity.

But then it seems that the real distinction stands and falls with the doctrine of divine creation.

Why I Rarely Allow Comments

Because of comments like these, though they are surely not the worst one can find. (I cite them only because my Referral List pointed me to the post to which they are appended.) But they are characteristic. In my experience, to discuss religion with the irreligious and the anti-religious is a sheer waste of time. You may as well discuss logic with the illogical, music with the unmusical, or poetry with the terminally prosaic.

I am regularly surprised by how much garbage Victor Reppert tolerates in his ComBox. He will even allow people to insult him in vile ways. It may be that he is a model of Christian detachment, slow to anger, quick to forgive, tolerant to a fault. It may also be that he doesn't appreciate that to tolerate bad behavior is to invite more of the same. A conservative, I take a harsher line, one more in keeping with the realities of human nature, realities liberals tend to ignore. Conservatism as I espouse and practice it subsumes the classically liberal commitment to toleration. But toleration has limits. In any case, a weblog is private property where no one has free speech rights.

A man's home is his castle, and his blog his cybercastle. Just as I do not tolerate bad behavior in the first, I do not tolerate it in the second. But bloggers are free to run their blogs any way they see fit.

You might think that disallowing comments limits my traffic. Not so. Traffic is better than ever, recently up around 2000 pageviews per diem. Readers I respect tell me that they like my Comments Policy.

To end aphoristically:

The best arguments against an open combox are the contents of one.

Carolyn Cassady (1923 – 2013)

I thought of Carolyn in September and I thought I ought to check the obituaries. She died September 20th at age 90, her longevity as if in counterpoise to the short tenures of her main men, wildman Neal Cassady, the Dean Moriarty of Kerouac's 1957 On the Road, and the brooding Jack Kerouac himself. Carolyn played the stabilizer to the mania of the one and the melancholy of the other. Both quit the sublunary before the '60s had run their course. The tale of Jack's end has been told too many times, though I will tell it again on 21 October, the 44th anniversary of his exit from the "slaving meat wheel." Neal's demise is less frequently recounted.

Neal
died in February of 1968, also of substance abuse, having quaffed a nasty
concotion of pulque and Seconals, while walking the railroad tracks near San Miguel de
Allende, Mexico. Legend has it that Cassady had been counting the ties and that
his last word was "64, 928." (Cf. William Plummer, The Holy Goof: A
Biography of Neal Cassady, Paragon, 1981, pp. 157-158.)

Carolyn kept the beat while the wildmen soloed, seeking ecstasy where it cannot be found.

May all who sincerely seek beatitude find it. Kerouac: "I want to be sincere." May Jack with his visions of Gerard, of Cody, finally enjoy the ultimate beat vision, the visio beata.

Linkage:

NYT obit. Plenty more at Beat Museum.

Linkage

Christina Hoff Sommers on Camille Paglia. Excerpt:

But Paglia stole the show. She deftly reminded the audience that Mother Nature tends to get the final word—and is not a feminist.

[. . .]

My favorite Pagliaism: ”Leaving sex to feminists is like letting your dog vacation at the taxidermist.”

Chicago Tribune: Obamacare a Mess. This got past the Chi-town censors?

Man prevents robbery but is fired for carrying gun. To a liberal this makes sense.

Existence Neither Accidental Nor Essential

This post continues my ruminations on the distinctio realis. If essence and existence are really distinct in a contingent being, should we think of its existence as accidental or essential, or neither?

Max, a cat of my acquintance, exists and exists contingently: there is no broadly logical necessity that he exist. His nonexistence is broadly logically possible. So one may be tempted to say that existence is to Max as accident to substance. One may be tempted to say that existence is accidental to Max. In general, the temptation is to say that existence is an accidental property of contingent beings, and that this accidentality is what makes them contingent.

But this can't be right. On a standard definition, if P is an accidental property of x, then x can exist without P. So if existence were an accidental property of Max, then, Max could exist without existing. Contradiction.

Ought we conclude that existence is an essential property of Max? If P is an essential property of x, then x cannot exist without P. So if existence were an essential property of Max, then Max cannot exist without existing. The consequent of the conditional is true, but tautologically so.

From this one can infer either that (i) Max is a necessary being (because her has existence essentially) or that (ii) existence construed as an essential property is not the genuine article. Now Max is surely not a necessary being. It is true that if he exists, then he exists, but from this one cannot validly infer that he exists. Suppose existence is a first-level property. Then it would makes sense to say that existence is an essential property of everything. After all, in every possible world in which Max exists, he exists! But all this shows is that existence construed as an essential property is not gen-u-ine, pound-the-table existence.

We ought to conclude that existence is neither accidental to a contingent thing, nor essential to it. No contingent thing is such that existence follows from its essence. And no contingent thing is such that its contingency can be understood by thinking of its existence as an accidental property of it. The contingency of Max's being sleepy can be understaood in terms of his instantiation of an accidental property; but the contingency of his very existence cannot be so understood.

If every first-level property is either accidental or essential, then existence is not a first-level-property. But, as I have argued many times, it does not follow that existence is a second-level property. The Fregean tradition went off the rails: existence cannot be a second-level property. Instantiation is a second-level property, but not existernce. And of course it cannot be a second-level property if one takes the real distinction seriously, this being a distinction between essence and existence 'in' the thing or 'at' the thing.

Where does this leave us? Max exists. Pace Russell, saying that Max exists is NOT like saying that Max is numerous. 'Exists,' unlike 'numerous,' has a legitimate first-level use. So existence belongs to Max. It belongs to him without being a property of him. One argument has already been sketched. To put it explicitly: Every first-level property is either essential or accidental; Existence is neither an essential nor an accidental first-level property; ergo, Existence is not a first-level property.

Existence belongs to Max without being a property of him. How is existence 'related' to Max if it is not a property of him?

In my existence book I maintained that existence belongs to a contingent being such as Max not as accident to substance, or as essence to primary substance, or as property to possessor, or as proper part to whole, or by identity; but as unity to items unified. In brief, the existence of a contingent thing is the contingent unity of its ontological constituents. The existence of Max is not one of his constituents but the unity of all his constituents.

This approach solves the problem of how existence can belong to a contingent being without being a property of it. But it raises vexing questions of its own, questions to be taken up in subsequent posts in this series.

One question I need to address is whether philosophy would have come up with the real distinction if it were not for the doctrine of divine creation ex nihilo.

Orwellian Bullshit

The POMO prez, Barack Obama, said last night (emphasis added):

As soon as I took office, I asked this Congress to send me a recovery plan by President's Day that would put people back to work and put money in their pockets. Not because I believe in bigger government — I don't.

Obama is not just a bullshitter, but an Orwellian bullshitter.

See articles below.