Bill Vallicella – Page 543 – Maverick Philosopher

Defending the Distinctio Realis Against Anthony Kenny

This post defends the real distinction between essence and existence. For some background, see Geach on the Real Distinction I.

In Aquinas on Being (Oxford 2002, p. 45), Anthony Kenny writes, "Peter's continuing to exist is the very same thing as Peter's continuing to possess his essence; if he ceases to exist, he ceases to be a human being and vice versa."

What Kenny is doing in this passage and the surrounding text is rejecting the real distinction between essence and (individual) existence. Thus in a cat, a dog, or a man, there is no distinction in reality between its essence or nature and its existence. In general, for items of kind K, to exist is to be a K. Thus for Socrates to exist is for Socrates to be a man; for Socrates to continue to exist is for Socrates to continue to be a man; and for Socrates to cease to exist is for Socrates to cease being a man.

The claim that for items of kind K, to exist is to be a K, is to be understood, not as a logical or metaphysical equivalence, but as an identity that sanctions a reduction: the existence of Ks just is (identically) their K-ness. Individual (as opposed to what Kenny calls specific) existence reduces to nature. But that is just to say that there is no real distinction in a thing between its individual existence and its nature. For example, there is no non-notional or real distinction in Socrates between him and his existence.

I have three objections to this broadly Aristotelian theory of existence according to which individual existence reduces to nature.

An Argument from Contingency

Socrates might never have existed. If so, and if, for Socrates,
who is a man, to exist = to be a man, then Socrates might never have been a man. This
implies that a certain man, Socrates, might never have been a man, which
is absurd. Therefore, it is not the case that, for Socrates, to exist =
to be a man.

The first premise ought to be uncontroversial. Speaking tenselessly,
Socrates exists and Socrates is a man. But there is no logical or
metaphysical necessity that the man Socrates exist. So, Socrates, though he exists, is
possibly such that he does not exist. (This is equivalent to saying that
he is a contingent being.) So, given that to exist = to be a man,
the man Socrates is possibly such that he is not a man. But this
contradicts the fact that Socrates is essentially a man. For if he is essentially a man, then he is necessarily such that he is a man. Therefore, it
is not the case that, for Socrates, to exist = to be a man.

Convinced? Here is another way of looking at it. I point to Socrates and say, 'This might not have existed.' I say something true. But if I point to him and say, 'This might not have been a man,' I say something false. Therefore, for Socrates, to exist is not to be a man. Of course, he cannot exist without being a man, and he cannot BE a man without BEING. But that is not the question. The question is whether Socrates' being or existence is reducible to his being a man. I have just shown that it is not. Therefore, there is a real distinction between essence and existence in Socrates.

What holds for Socrates holds for every man. No man's very existence is reducible to his being a man. And in general, no individual K's individual existence is reducible to its being a K.

An Argument from Reference

If for Socrates to exist is for Socrates to be a man, then, when he ceases to exist, he ceases to be a man. But then the proper name 'Socrates' used after the philosopher's death does not refer to a man. But it does refer. For I can make true statements about Socrates, e.g., 'Socrates taught Plato.' And the name refers to a man. When Socrates ceased to exist, 'Socrates' did not commence referring to some other thing, a jelly fish say, or a valve-lifter in a '57 Chevy, or more plausibly, a corpse. A man taught Plato, not a corpse, or a pile of ashes. Therefore, it is not the case that for Socrates to exist is for Socrates to be a man.

To understand this argument, please note that it is not being denied that, necessarily, at every time at which Socrates is alive, Socrates exists if and only if he is a man. Socrates cannot exist without being a man, and he cannot be a man without existing. What is being denied, or rather questioned, is the identification of Socrates' existing with his being a man. As I have pointed out many times before, logical equivalences do not sanction reductions.

A Third Argument

We cannot say that to exist = to be a cat, for then only cats could exist. We, or rather the Aristotelian, has to say that, for cats, to exist = to be a cat. In general, for K-items, to exist = to be a K. But why stop here? Can we stop here? There are no cats in general. There are only particular cats, any two of which are numerically distinct, and each of which has its own existence. Consider Max and Manny, two cats of my acquaintance. Each has his own existence, but they share the nature, cat. So if each exists in virtue of being a cat, then each exists in virtue of being the very cat that it is, which is to say: for Max to exist is for Max to be Max, and for Manny to exist is for Manny to be Manny. But then, generalizing, to exist = to be self-identical. The theory we began with collapses into the existence = self-identity theory.

But while each thing is self-identical — this is just the Law of Identity — no contingent thing is identical to its own existence. For if Max were identical to his own existence, then Max would necessarily exist. If God exists, then God is identical to his own existence. But Max is not God. Therefore, existence cannot be reduced to self-identity in the case of contingent beings.

Of course, given that contingent things exist, they must be self-identical, and they cannot BE self-identical unless they ARE or exist. But there might not have been any contingent things at all. So the existence of a thing cannot be reduced to the self-identity it could have only if it exists. Get it? If yes, then you understand the real distinction.

Contemporary Liberal Doublethink: Welfare = Self-Reliance

First of all, what is doublethink? We turn to George Orwell's 1984 and the following quotation therefrom reproduced in Wikipedia:

The keyword here is blackwhite. Like so many Newspeak words, this word has two mutually contradictory meanings. Applied to an opponent, it means the habit of impudently claiming that black is white, in contradiction of the plain facts. Applied to a Party member, it means a loyal willingness to say that black is white when Party discipline demands this. But it means also the ability to believe that black is white, and more, to know that black is white, and to forget that one has ever believed the contrary. This demands a continuous alteration of the past, made possible by the system of thought which really embraces all the rest, and which is known in Newspeak as doublethink. Doublethink is basically the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.

— Part II, Chapter IX — The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism

This official website is an excellent contemporary example of doublethink, from the State of Idaho, of all places. (One expects PeeCee doublethink and newspeak in the People's Republic of Taxachusetts and in the once Golden State of Californication, but in Idaho, with all its Mormons and gun-totin' conservatives? Holy moly, things are worse than I thought.) At the State of Idaho website we read:

The Idaho Department of Health and Welfare's Self Reliance Office 6/2010

What is the Self Reliance office?

The Self Reliance office is the portion of Idaho Health and Welfare where people can apply for state funded public assistance.

This is what we call an 'Orwellian' use of language. It is language perverted and destroyed so as to serve leftist ideology and make clear thinking impossible. Accordingly, one who accepts welfare via the State from productive citizens is 'self-reliant,' when in truth he is the exact opposite.

Black is white, war is peace, freedom is slavery, and reliance on others is self-reliance.

Limited government is anarchism.

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness = ObamaCare. (Idiot Pelosi accurately paraphrased.)

Fiscal responsibility = fiscal irresponsibility.

Semi-automatic rifle = fully- automatic rifle.

Semi-automatic rifle used purely defensively = assault weapon.

Constitutionally-mandated border control = xenophobia.

ID requirement at polling place = disenfranchisement.

Critic of a black person's ideas = racist.

And so on. Continue the list and resolve to do your bit to resist and oppose the liberal-left scumbaggers. It is your life, liberty and happiness that are at stake.

Big Sur, the Movie

A tip of the beret to Monterey Tom, fellow Kerouac aficionado, Octoberite, native Californian, and fellow lonesome traveller along Highway One for alerting me to the arrival of Big Sur, the movie, based on the eponymous novel by Jack Kerouac. Appropriately enough, it is scheduled to open here in the Valle del Sol on November 1st, All Saints' Day on the Catholic calendar. If you live hereabouts it will debut locally at the Harkins Shea 14 in Scottsdale. I think I'll catch the 11:00 AM performance, then have lunch at an authentic Jewish delicatessen Peter L. introduced me to: Goldman's Deli near the corner of N. Hayden and E. Indian Bend.

Big Sur trailer

A Note on David Mamet

I stumbled upon a good brisk read the other day by David Mamet in the genre, How I finally saw the light and stopped being a benighted leftist. The title is The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture (Sentinel, 2011). Here is a taste, from a footnote on p. 10:

*The Left and the Right, I saw, differ not about programs, but about goals — the goal of the Left is a government-run country and that of the Right the freedom of the individual from Government. These goals are difficult to reconcile, as the Left cannot be brought to actually state its intentions, nor to honestly evaluate the results of its actions.

In his second sentence, Mamet makes two extremely important points. The first is that leftists employ a stealth strategy. They are not open about their ultimate goals. The gun-grabbers among them, for example, will rarely state openly that one of their goals is the banning of the private ownership of handguns. They know full well that an open espousal of their totalitarian agenda would incite the opposition of the 'tea-baggers' as they derisively call Tea Party members as well as that of the rest of the rubes of fly-over country. The second point it that leftists, as adherents of a quasi-religion, are committed to its nostrums whether or not they work out in reality. Are the public schools better than they were in '65? Obviously not. So throw more money at them while harrassing homeschoolers and blocking voucher programs.

But I must quibble with Mamet's first sentence. It is simply not the case that the goal of the Right is freedom of the individual from government. That is a goal of anarchists, but conservatism is twice-removed from anarchism. For between anarchism and conservatism lies libertarianism. Conservatives are law and order types. They believe in a strong national defense. They want the nation's borders to be secure. All of this requires local, state, and Federal government.

When leftists say as they repeatedly do that conservatives are anti-government, that is a lie and they know it. It is a mistake for Mamet to give aid and comfort to this lie. Conservatives are for limited government. It takes no great logical acumen to see that if one is for limited government, then one is for government. And even a liberal should be able to understand that it is a false alternative to suppose that the choice is between no government and totalitarian government.

Addendum (10/14)

Christopher Hitchens' NYT review of Mamet begins thusly: "This is an extraordinarily irritating book, written by one of those people who smugly believe that, having lost their faith, they must ipso facto have found their reason."

And as I read more of it, I am becoming irritated myself. Consider his answers to the questions put to him in an interview. The questions are serious, but he returns frivolous answers, e.g.:

You also wrote about hating “every wasted, hard-earned cent I spent in taxes.” What cent did you hate the most?
All of them gall me the most.

Only a lunatic extremist would think every cent paid in taxes was wasted. And surely no conservative would maintain such an absurd position.

We don't need more extremists. Contemporary liberalism is a set of extreme positions. The answer, however, is not some opposite form of extremism. I believe it was Goethe who said that no one is more hostile to a position than one who once espoused it but has come to reject it. I paraphrase.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: The Beach Boys

Given the shenanigans in Washington, D. C., you would naturally expect me to begin with . . . wait for it . . . . Shut Down!

Then I Kissed Her is the Beach Boys' response to the Crystal's Then He Kissed Me. Nice job, boys, but nothing can hold a candle to Phil Spector's wall of sound.

Apparently, Brian Wilson was obsessed with the Ronette's Be My Baby, another Phil Spector production. Wilson's response was Don't Worry Baby.

Brian Wilson wrote great melodies, e.g., Please Let Me Wonder, In the Back of My Mind, God Only Knows.

And the BBs were famous for their harmonies. When I Grow Up to be a Man. I'm so Young, Help Me Rhonda.

Thanks, boys, for over 50 years of Good Vibrations.

Finally, here is Phil Spector holding forth on John Lennon, Mean Streets, Martin Scorsese, and Brian Wilson.

In Fairness to Dworkin

In an earlier post I commented with some trenchancy on Ronald Dworkin's views about religion in Religion Without God as these views were represented by Peter Berkowitz in a recent article. Although I was careful to point out that my remarks presupposed the accuracy of Berkowitz's representation, I was a bit uneasy about my comments, not having consulted Dworkin's book. I am therefore happy to reproduce the following missive from a Columbia University graduate student, Luke MacInnis, to balance out the picture.

………….

I enjoy your blog, and especially your excellent running commentary on Tom Nagel. I wanted to comment on your recent post on Peter Berkowitz's review of Ronald Dworkin's Religion Without God. Berkowitz's comments center exclusively on, and misrepresent, a very short passage toward the start of the book, which you suggest amounts to a "miserable leftist substitute for religion" that "leaves out what is absolutely central to religion, namely, the conviction that there is a transcendent dimension, an "unseen order." But in fact Dworkin does not say that religion "consists in" those two central judgments. Immediately (the next page) after describing these judgments, he adds "For many people religion includes much more than those two values", approvingly quotes William James' view that religion "adds to life an enchantment which is not rationally or logically deducible from anything else", and then himself adds that this "enchantment is the discovery of transcendental value in what seems otherwise transient or dead." He provides important, though brief, discussions of Rudolph Otto's views on religion's numinous character, and emphasizes his own rejection of naturalist metaphysics (a long-running theme in all of Dworkin's work, but most explicit and developed in Justice for Hedgehogs).

So he does not deny religion's transcendent, unseen dimension. Nor does he offer any definitions that offend ordinary language (he provides many examples to make this point. Berkowitz mentions none of them). Dworkin describes the "two judgments" as a manifestation of a particular kind of religious attitude (or temperament, to use Nagel's term) that some (though not all) atheists might be said to have, and which does not include a belief in a supreme, intelligent creator. Dworkin's general account of religion is broad because he aims at ecumenism. That hardly makes it a "miserable leftist substitute". It is an attempt to find common ground between atheists and theists in a more basic reverence toward the "unseen" both share but cash out in inconsistent metaphysics.

Regarding your final question ("if it is wrong for the State to impose religion on its citizens, why isn't it also wrong for the State to impose leftist ideology on its citizens as it is now doing here in the USA?), you might be interested in Dworkin's answer in Chapter 3 of RWG, where he concedes the symmetry between theistic and scientific explanations of the origin of conscious life ("if relying on one judgment to mandate a curriculum is an unconstitutional establishment of religious belief, then so is relying on the other." (128)), recognizes that liberalism to this point has no adequate response to this problem, and offers what is indeed a "radical" argument that involves eliminating specific rights to religious freedom altogether.

Berkowitz ignores all of this, and I wish others would not comment so decisively on the book based on such an inadequate review (notwithstanding your brief "if this is what Dworkin maintains" qualification). I find this is particularly common with Dworkin's work, and it is unfortunate because it usually obscures the complexity and value of his contribution.

Thanks, and keep up the great work with the blog!

Cat Blogging Saturday: Bob the Cat

An international sensation

Obama as Bullshitter

While listening the other day to Barack Obama shuck and jive about fiscal responsiblity, shamelessly posturing as if he and not his Republican opponents is the fiscally responsible one, when he is in truth the apotheosis or, if you prefer, the Platonic Form of fiscal irresponsibility, I realized just how uncommonly good our POMO Prez is at bullshitting. He is indeed a consummate bullshitter. But what is it to bullshit, exactly? When is a statement bullshit?

Now what does this have to do with Obama? As Frankfurt points out, the essence of bullshit is a lack of concern for truth. But truth and consistency are closely related notions. Two statements are consistent (inconsistent) just in case they can (cannot) both be true. Now I do not know if there are any cases of Obama contradicting himself synchronically (at a time), but there are plenty of examples of him contradicting himself diachronically. He said things as a senator the opposite of which he says now. Victor Davis Hanson supplies numerous examples in Obama as Chaos:

. . . when the president takes up a line of argument against his opponents, it cannot really be taken seriously — not just because it is usually not factual, but also because it always contradicts positions that Obama himself has taken earlier or things he has previously asserted. Whom to believe — Obama 1.0, Obama 2.0, or Obama 3.0?

When the president derides the idea of shutting down the government over the debt ceiling, we almost automatically assume that he himself tried to do just that when as a senator he voted against the Bush administration request in 2006, when the debt was about $6 trillion less than it is now.

The problem here is not merely logical; it is also ethical: the man is not truthful. Truth, falsity, consistency, inconsistency pertain to propositions, not persons. Truthfulness, deceitfulness, lack of concern for truth and consistency — these are ethical attributes, properties of persons. Obama the bullshitter is an ethically defective president. When Nixon lied, he could be shamed by calling him on it. That is because he was brought up properly, to value truth and truthfulness. But the POMO Obama, like that "first black president" Bill Clinton, apparently can't be shamed. It's all bullshit and fakery and shuckin' and jivin'. There is no gravitas in these two 'black' presidents, the one wholly white, the other half-white. Everything's a 'narrative' — good POMO word, that — and the only question is whether the narrative works in the moment for political advantage. A narrative needn't be true to be a narrative, which is why the POMO types like it. Hanson has Obama's number:

But a third explanation is more likely. Obama simply couldn’t care less about what he says at any given moment, whether it is weighing in on the football name “Redskins” or the Travyon Martin trial. He is detached and unconcerned about the history of an issue, about which he is usually poorly informed. Raising the debt ceiling is an abstraction; all that matters is that when he is president it is a good thing and when he is opposing a president it is a bad one. Let aides sort out the chaos. Obamacare will lower premiums, not affect existing medical plans, and not require increased taxes; that all of the above are untrue matters nothing. Who could sort out the chaos?

[. . .]

The media, of course, accepts that what Obama says on any given day will contradict what he has said or done earlier, or will be an exaggeration or caricature of his opponents’ position, or simply be detached from reality. But in their daily calculus, that resulting chaos is minor in comparison to the symbolic meaning of Obama. He is, after all, both the nation’s first African-American president and our first left-wing progressive since Franklin Roosevelt.

In comparison with those two facts, no others really matter.

Anderson on Nagel

Interest in Thomas Nagel's Mind and Cosmos continues unabated. James N. Anderson weighs in here. I thank James for his linkage to my series of Nagel posts.

Nine Impediments to Religious Belief

Why is religious belief so hard to accept? Herewith, some notes toward a list of the impedimenta, the stumbling blocks, that litter and lie in the path of the would-be believer. Whether the following ought to be impediments is a further question, a normative question. The following taxonomy is merely descriptive. And not in order of stopping power. And perhaps incomplete. This is a blog. This is only a blog.

1. The obtrusiveness and constancy and coherence of the deliverances of the senses, outer and inner. The "unseen order" (William James), if such there be, is no match for the 'seen order.' The massive assault upon the sense organs has never been greater than at the present time given the high technology of distraction: radio, TV, portable telephony, the Internet . . . and Twitter, the ultimate weapon of mass distraction. Here is some advice on how to avoid God from C. S. Lewis, "The Seeing Eye" in Christian Reflections (Eeerdmans, 1967), pp. 168-167:

Avoid silence, avoid solitude, avoid any train of thought that leads off the beaten track. Concentrate on money, sex, status, health and (above all) on your own grievances. Keep the radio on. Live in a crowd. Use plenty of sedation. If you must read books, select them very carefully. But you'd be safer to stick to the papers. You'll find the advertisements helpful; especially those with a sexy or a snobbish appeal.

If Lewis could only see us now.

2. The fact that there are many competing systems of religious belief and practice. They overlap, but they also contradict. The extant contradictory systems cannot all be true, though they could all be false. The fact that one's own system is contradicted by others doesn't make it false, but it does raise reasonable doubts as to whether it is true. For a thinking person, this is a stumbling block to the naive and unthinking acceptance of the religion in which one has been brought up.

3. The specificity of religious belief systems and their excessively detailed dogmatic contents. One is put off by the presumptuousness of those who claim to know what they cannot, or are not likely, to know. For example, overconfident assurances as to the natures of heaven, hell, and purgatory together with asseverations as to who went where. Stalin in hell? How do you know? How do you even know that there is a place of everlasting punishment as opposed to such other options as simple annihilation of unrepentant miscreants?

The presumptuousness of those who fancy that they understand the economics of salvation to such a degree that they can condifently assert that so many Hail Mary's will remove so many years in purgatory. For many, such presumptuousness is an abomination, though not as bad as the sale of indulgences.

4. The fact that the religions of the world, over millenia, haven't done much to improve us individually or collectively. Even if one sets aside the intemperate fulminations of the New Atheists, that benighted crew uniquely blind to the good religion has done, there is the fact that religious belief and practice, even if protracted and sincere, do little toward the moral improvement of people. To some this is an impediment to acceptance of a religion.

Related point: the corruption of the churches.

Again, my task here is merely descriptive. I am not claiming that one ought to be dissuaded from religion by its failure to improve people much or to maintain itself in institutional form without corruption.

5. The putative conflict between science and religion. Competing magisteria each with a loud claim to be the proper guide to life. Thinking people are bothered by this.

6. The tension between Athens (philosophy) and Jerusalem (religion).

7. The weight of concupiscence. We are sexual beings naturally, and oversexualized beings socially, and so largely unable to control our drives. The thrust of desire makes most real the sensuous while occluding one's spiritual sight. Is it any surprise that the atheist Russell, even in old age, refused to be faithful to his wife? It is reasonable to conjecture that his lust and his pride — intellectuals tend to be very proud with outsized egos– blinded him to spirtual realities.

8. Suggestibility. We are highly sensitive and responsive to social suggestions as to what is real and important and what is not. In a society awash with secular suggestions, people find it hard to take religion seriously.

9. The apparent moral and logical absurdities of some religious doctrines. "God said to Abraham, Kill me a son!" See Kant on Abraham and Isaac.

Why Saggy Pants?

Peter proffered a theory over Sunday breakfast a while back. 'Gangsta' rappers and their imitators are aping the sartorial disarray of prison inductees. When you arrive at the slammer, the Man takes away your belt, so your pants fall down. So 'gangsta' rappers and their imitators are preparing themselves for prison life or else showing their solidarity with their incarcerated brothers.

Thinking that this might just be an urban legend, I headed over to Snopes, where I find Peter's theory confirmed. The droopy drawers dudes in prisons are not advertising their availability for sodomy, as some have surmised, but expose their butts because of over-sized beltless prison garb , the belts having been taken away to keep the miscreants from hanging themselves.

The question remains, however, why the rappers and their acolytes would choose criminals as their role models.

In all my years of blogging, this is only my third sartorial post. The other two are lodged, appropriately enough, in the category, Sartorial Matters. One mentions Montaigne, the other Adorno.

Nanny State Update: Of Footballs and Food Stamps

Wussification proceeds apace (emphasis added):

As CBS 2’s Jennifer McLogan reported Monday, officials at Weber Middle School in Port Washington are worried that students are getting hurt during recess. Thus, they have instituted a ban on footballs, baseballs, lacrosse balls, or anything that might hurt someone on school grounds.

If you don't see this absurdity within the context of Right-Left struggle, you won't understand it. It is of a piece with the general wussification and infantilization of the populace promoted by leftists, the active promotion of food stamp dependency being a prime example.

As
you know, they are not called Food Stamps anymore. The program has been given the snappy
new label, at once both a euphemism and an acronym, SNAP: Supplemental
Nutritional Assistance Program. And it is actively promoted.

Liberals will call it part of the social
safety net. That metaphor suggests something to keep one from falling to one's
death. But it is also a net in the sense of a fishing net, a device that
entraps and deprives of liberty. But liberals ignore this aspect of their
favorite programs. For self-reliance and the nanny state don't go
together. Since the nanny state serves the interests of liberals,
self-reliance has to be diminished. Part of the motivation of the liberal is
to help the needy. But another part is the lust for power which, to be
retained, requires plenty of clients, plenty of dependents who can be relied
upon to vote Democrat, thereby voting goodies for themselves in the short term–
and the long-term fiscal and moral solvency of the nation be damned.

Am I
opposed to all social welfare programs? No. There are those who truly need help
and cannot be helped by private charities. But I am opposed to the current,
utterly irresponsible expansion of the welfare state, and for two reasons. One
is economic: the expansion is unsustainable. The other is moral: it diminishes
and degrades and infantilizes people. "The bigger the government, the smaller
the citizen." (D. Prager)

Food Stamps: the 'bread' in bread and circuses.

Progressivism as Religion: Peter Berkowitz on Ronald Dworkin

Here. Excerpt:

For Dworkin, the meaning of religion consists in “two central judgments about value” that he believes religious people — theists and some atheists — regard as objectively true. First, “each person has an innate and inescapable responsibility to try to make his life a successful one: that means living well, accepting ethical responsibilities to oneself as well as moral responsibilities to others, not just if we happen to think this important but because it is in itself important whether we think so or not.” Second, “what we call ‘nature’ — the universe as a whole and in all its parts — is not just a matter of fact but is itself sublime: something of intrinsic value and wonder.”

If this is what Dworkin maintains, then his characterization of religion leaves a lot to be desired, to put it mildly. This is obviously NOT what the meaning of religion consists in on any adequate understanding of religion. Religion cannot be reduced to axiology. True, the religious will accept that there are objective values and disvalues. But such acceptance, even if necessary for being religious, is not sufficient.

All or most of the following are beliefs essential to anything that can be legitimately called a religion:

1.
The belief that there is what William James calls an "unseen order."
(Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 53) This is a realm of absolute
reality that lies beyond the perception of the five outer senses and their
instrumental extensions. It is also inaccessible to inner sense or
introspection. It is also not a realm of mere abstracta or thought-contents.
So it lies beyond the discursive intellect. It is accessible from our side via
mystical and religious experience. An initiative from its side is not to be
ruled out in the form of revelation.

2.
The belief that there is a supreme good for humans and that "our supreme good
lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves" to the "unseen order."
(Varieties, p. 53)

3.
The conviction that we are morally deficient, and that this deficiency impedes
our adjustment to the unseen order. Man is in some some sense fallen from the
moral height at which he would have ready access to the unseen order. His moral
corruption, however it came about, has noetic consequences.

4.
The conviction that our moral deficiency cannot be made sufficiently good by
our own efforts to afford us ready access to the unseen order.

5.
The conviction that adjustment to the unseen order requires moral
purification/transformation.

6.
The conviction that help from the side of the unseen order is available to bring
about this purification and adjustment.

7.
The conviction that the sensible order is not plenary in point of reality or
value, that it is ontologically and axiologically derivative. It is a
manifestation or emanation or creation of the unseen order.

In a word, Dworkin's characterization leaves out Transcendence; it leaves out what is absolutely central to religion, namely, the conviction that there is a transcendent dimension, an "unseen order," (see #1 supra) and that adjustment to this order is essential to human flourishing (see #2 supra).

What Dworkin has delivered is a miserable leftist substitute for religion. Being a leftist, he of course cannot value or perhaps even understand the genuine article; but he at least could have had the intellectual honesty not to try to redefine something whose definition is tolerably clear. Berkowitz has it right:

. . . Dworkin redefines religion to conform to his progressive sensibilities. What he presents as the offering of an olive branch to believers may seem to a person of faith, with justice, as a hostile takeover attempt. The steps by which Dworkin appropriates the religious label for his own left-liberal and atheistic outlook provide a case study in how the progressive mind, under the guise of conciliation, seeks to command the moral high ground exclusively and discredit that which differs from it.

"Hostile takeover" is right. Berkowitz also perceptively notes that

Dworkin also overlooks a formidable problem latent in his sanctification of the progressive perspective. If progressivism counts as a religion, then enacting the left-liberal policy agenda would seem to represent an establishment of religion in violation of the First Amendment.

But of course progressivism is not a religion, but an anti-religious political ideology. Nevertheless, one can and must ask: if it is wrong for the State to impose religion on its citizens, why isn't it also wrong for the State to impose leftist ideology on its citizens as it now doing here in the USA?

I take a stab at this question in Separation of Leftism and State.

Stephen “God is not One” Prothero to Speak at Arizona State University

Details here. What follows is an excerpt from a 2010 post:

Religions: Problems, Solutions, Techniques

Simplifying a four-part
schema employed by Stephen Prothero in his God Is Not One (Harper,
2010, p. 14), I propose, in agreement with Prothero, that each religion can be
usefully seen as addressing itself to a problem; offering a
solution to the problem, a solution that also constitutes the
religion's goal; and proposing a technique for solving the problem and
achieving the goal.

This post will consider five
religions and how the simplified Prothero schema applies to them.

For Christianity, the problem
is sin, the solution or goal is salvation, and the technique is some combination
of faith and good works. (14) For Buddhism, the problem is suffering, the
solution or goal is nirvana, and the technique for achieving nirvana is the
Noble Eightfold Path. (14) Prothero's main purpose in his book is to stress the
differences between religions. That is the point of the silly title, "God is
Not One." Obviously, God is one by definition; it is the conceptions of God
that are various. It is also a bad title because Prothero's topic is religion,
not theism. Buddhism, after all, is not a theistic religion. But let that
pass. I can't fault the man for wanting to attract buyers with a catchy title,
one reminiscent of Hitchens' God Is Not Great. The schema makes clear
the differences between these two great religions:

Are Buddhists trying to
achieve salvation? Of course not, since they do not even believe in sin. Are
Christians trying to achieve nirvana? No, since for them suffering isn't
something that must be overcome. (15)

If salvation is
salvation from sin, then of course Prothero is right. Sin is an offence against
God, and in a religion with no God there can be no sin. Nevertheless, I am a
bit uneasy with the starkness of Prothero's contrast. The Buddhist too aims at
a sort of salvation, salvation from all-pervasive suffering. To use 'salvation'
so narrowly that it applies only to the Christian's religious goal obscures the
commonality between the two great religions. I should think that some
soteriology or other is essential to every religion. A religion must show a
way out of our unsatisfactory predicament, and one is not religious unless one
perceives our life in this world as indeed a predicament, and one that is deeply
and fundamentally unsatisfactory, whatever the exact nature of the
satisfactoriness.

Read it all.

I also quote Prothero in On Religious Pluralism and Religious Tolerance wherein I land some hard blows on Sam Harris.

Is A Primary Substance Minus its Accidents a Primary Substance?

I return to a question I was discussing back in August with John the Commenter and more recently with Lukas Novak. The question concerns how to define 'primary substance.' I suggested the following: ". . . an individual or singular complete concrete entity together with its accidents. " But why include the accidents? I gave the following argument:

1. Every primary substance is ontologically basic, where ontologically basic entities are those that exist
per se or independently unlike secondary substances and accidents.

2. Every ontologically basic entity is complete.

Definition: x is complete =_df for every predicate F, either x is F or x is not F. (This is rough since some restrictions will have to be placed on the range of the predicate F. But it is good enough for a blog post.) Thus either Socrates is seated at t or he is not. If he is neither seated nor not seated at t, then he is an incomplete object at t. But if he is an incomplete object at t, then he cannot exist at t. Now every ontologically basic entity is possibly such that it exists. Therefore, every ontologically basic entity is complete. Every ontologically basic entity satisfies the predicate version of the Law of Excluded Middle. (I don't think the converse is true, but then I am not affirming the converse.)

Therefore

3. Every primary substance is complete. (from 1, 2)

4. No primary substance minus its accidents is complete.

5. No primary substance minus its accidents is a primary substance. (from 3, 4)

Lukas Novak responds:

. . . although I concede that necessarily, Socrates has this or that accident, I deny that it follows from it that Socrates considered in abstraction from these accidents is an incomplete object. When Socrates runs, the whole of Socrates is there. When Socrates does not run, again, the whole of Socrates is there. But for any x, y, if the whole of x is there even if y is not there then y is not required for the completeness of x. So Socrates considered precisely qua Socrates, without running or not-running, is complete, and a substance – – the fact that a necessary condition of his existence is that he is connected either with the accident of running or the accident of not-running notwithstanding.

I suspect that Novak has committed an ignoratio elenchi against me. I grant that when Socrates runs, the whole of Socrates is present, and that when he is not running, the whole of him is present. (For when he is not running, he is walking, or skipping, or jumping, or standing still, or crouching . . . .) And so I grant that it is not necessary for the completeness of Socrates that he be running, and that it is not necessary for the completeness of Socrates that he be not running. But — and here is my point — it is necessary for the completeness of Socrates that either he be running or not-running. If he is neither, then he is incomplete, hence not a primary substance. The same holds for all contingent accidents.

Therefore, a primary substance minus its accident is not a primary substance.

My argument above is valid. If Novak thinks it unsound, he must tell me which premise he rejects.