We are ignorant about ultimates and we will remain ignorant in this life. Perhaps on the Far Side we will learn what we cannot learn here. But whether there is survival of bodily death, and whether it will improve our epistemic position, are again things about which — we will remain ignorant in this life.
It is admittedly strange to suppose that death is the portal to knowledge. But is it stranger than supposing that a being capable of knowledge simply vanishes with the breakdown of his body?
The incapacity of materialists to appreciate the second strangeness I attribute to their invincible body-identification.
Way to go, Cuomo. Ten-round magazines are now illegal for everyone in New York state, included active duty cops. This requires no commentary. File it under "Liberal Stupidity." An amendment is in the works, but will it exempt retired cops?
The Showmen, It Will Stand. If you remember this underplayed oldie, I'll buy you one scotch, one bourbon, one beer. There was an apologetic sub-genre around this time (1961) of songs celebrating R & R.
Fleetwood Mac, Mission Bell. Haunting cover of the upbeat Donnie Brooks hit.
Them, Here Comes the Night. This YouTuber got it right: "Love this song – still sounds as raw and as fresh as it did nearly 50 years ago!" Yes, raw, edgy, yet tender. Unforgettable.
In the opening pages of More Kinds of Being: A Further Study of Individuation, Identity, and the Logic of Sortal Terms (Blackwell, 2009), E. J. Lowe distinguishes five uses of ‘is’ as a copula: 1. The ‘is’ of attribution, as in ‘Socrates is wise’ and ‘Grass is green’.2. The ‘is’ of identity, as in ‘Napoleon is Bonaparte’ and ‘Water is H2O’.3. The ‘is’ of instantiation, as in ‘Mars is a planet’ and ‘A horse is a mammal’.4. The ‘is’ of constitution, as in ‘This ring is gold’ and ‘A human body is a collection of cells’.5. The ‘is’ of existence, as in ‘The Dodo is no more’.He says some may be reducible to others, and that one or two must be primitive. I thought this was a helpful spread.
That is indeed helpful, but here are some comments and questions.
1. First of all, I would be surprised if Lowe referred to the five uses as five uses of 'is' as a copula. The 'is' of existence is not a copula because it doesn't couple. There is no copulation, grammatical or logical, in 'God is.' The 'is' of existence does not pick out any sort of two-termed relation such as identity, instantiation, or constitution. Calling the 'is' of identity a copula is a bit of a stretch, and I don't think most philosophers would.
2. Is there a veritative use of 'is'? 'It is so.' 'It is the case that Frege died in 1925.' One could say, though it is not idiomatic: 'Obama's being president is.' One would be expressing that the state of affairs obtains or that the corresponding proposition is true. So it looks as if there is a veritative use of 'is.'
3. Reducibility of one use to another does not show that they are not distinct uses. Perhaps the veritative use can be reduced to what Lowe calls the attributive use. Attributions of truth, however, imply that truth is a property. Frege famously argued that truth cannot be a property. That is a messy separate can of worms.
4. There are also tensed and tenseless uses of 'is.' 'Obama is president' versus '7 + 5 is 12.' With respect to the latter, it would be a bad joke, one reminiscent of Yogi Berra, were I to ask,"You mean now?" Yogi Berra was once asked the time. He said,"You mean now?"
'Hume is an empiricist' can be used both in a tensed way and an untensed way. If I say that Hume is an empiricist what I say is true despite the present nonexistence of Hume. 'Grass is green,' however, is never used in a tensed way, though one can imagine circumstances in which it could.
5. One and the same tokening of 'is' can do more than one job. Is the 'is' in 'Max is black' as used by me in the presence of my cat Max the 'is' of predication merely? I don't think so. It also expresses existence. But this requires argument:
1. 'Max is black' and 'Black Max exists' are intertranslatable. 2. Intertranslatable sentences have the same sense. Therefore 3. 'Max is black' and 'Black Max exists' express the very same (Fregean) sense. Therefore 4. Both sentences express both predication and existence: a property is predicated of something that cannot have properties unless it exists. Therefore 5. The 'is' in 'Max is black' has a double function: it expresses both predication and existence.
Note that both sentences include a sign for the predicative tie. The sign is 'is' in the first sentence and in the second sentence the sign is the immediate concatenation of 'black' and 'Max' in that order. This shows that to refer to logical (as opposed to grammatical) copulation does not require a separate stand-alone sign. 'Black Max exists' expresses both existence via the sign 'exsts' and predication via the immeditae concatenation of 'black' and 'Max' in that order in the context of the sentence in question.
Once you have removed every vestige of religion from the public square,what will you put in its place? The dogmas of the 'religion' of leftism? You want church-state separation, but you make an exception for the 'church' of leftism? Double standard!
Rehearsals are for a future performance. Why then are you 'rehearsing' that altercation with so-and-so from twenty years ago? Do you plan to bring it back to the stage?
The soldier's operations in the field are often encumbered by the presence of civilians and considerations of 'collateral damage.' The seaman's is a purer form of combat. Ships far out at sea. All hands combatants. No civilians to get in the way. Less worry over environmental degradation. The 'purity' of naval over land warfare. Bellicosity in the realm of Neptune must breed a brand of brotherhood among the adversaries not encountered on terra firma.
I put the question to Manny K. Black, brother of Max Black, but all I got was a yawn for my trouble. The title question surfaced in the context of a discussion of mereological models of the Trinity. Each of the three Persons is God. But we saw that the 'is' cannot be read as the 'is' of identity on pain of contradiction. So it was construed as the 'is' of predication. Accordingly, 'The Father (Son, etc.) is God' was taken to express that the Father (Son, etc.) is divine. But that has the unwelcome consequence that there are three Gods unless it can be shown that something can be F without being an F. At this point the cat strolls into the picture. Could something be feline without being a feline? The skeleton of a cat, though not a cat, is a proper part of a cat. And similarly for other cat parts. As a proper part of a cat the skeleton of a cat is feline. And it is supposed to be feline in the same sense of 'feline' as the cat itself is feline.
Now if the proper parts of a cat can be feline in the very same sense in which the cat is feline, without themselves being cats, then we have an analogy that renders intelligible the claim that the Persons of the Trinity are divine without being Gods. The picture is this: God or the Godhead or the Trinity is a whole the proper parts of which are exactly the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. The Persons are distinct among themselves, but each is divine in virtue of being a proper part of God. There is one God in three divine Persons. The mereological model allows us to avoid tritheism and to affirm that God is one and three without contradiction.
I have already expressed my doubt whether the mereological model can accommodate the divine unity. But now I raise a different question. Is 'feline' being used univocally – in the very same sense – when applied to a cat and when applied to a proper part of a cat such as a cat's skeleton?
This is not obvious. It appears to be being used analogically. We can exclude equivocity of the sort illustrated by the equivocity of 'bank' as between 'money bank' and 'river bank.' Clearly, we are not simply equivocating when we apply 'feline' to both cat and skeleton. But can we exclude analogicity?
To cop an example from Aristotle, consider 'healthy.' The cat is healthy. Is its food healthy? In one sense 'no' since it is not even alive. In another sense 'yes' insofar as 'healthy' food conduces to health in the cat. Similarly with the cat's urine, blood, exercise, and coat. Urine cannot be healthy in exactly the same sense in which the cat is healthy, but it is healthy in an analogical sense inasmuch as its indicates health in the animal.
Since a skeleton is called feline only by reference to an animal whose skeleton it is, I suggest 'feline' in application to a cat skeleton is being used analogically. If this is right,then the Persons are divine in only an analogical sense, a result that does not comport well with orthodoxy.
You wrote: "For one thing, wholes depend on their parts for their existence, and not vice versa. (Unless you thought of parts as abstractions from the whole, which the Persons could not be.) Parts are ontologically prior to the wholes of which they are the parts.This holds even in the cases in which the whole is a necessary being and each part is as well." Chad M. seems to be following William Lane Craig. Craig's partner-in-crime is J. P. Moreland, who argues that with substances, the whole is metaphysically prior to its parts. For example, a heart has its identity only because it is a constituent of the human person. Removed from a human person, it ceases to be a heart.
If a concrete particular such as book counts as an Aristotelian primary substance, and it does, then I should think that the book as a whole is not metaphysically/ontologically prior to its (proper) parts. In cases like this the whole depends for its existence on the prior existence of the parts. First (both temporally and logically) you have the pages, glue, covers, etc., and then (both temporally and logically) you have the book. If, per impossibile, there were a book that always existed, it would still be dependent for its existence on the existence of its proper parts logically, though not temporally. So it is not true in general that "with substances, the whole is metaphysically prior to the parts."
But a book is an artifact whereas Kevin brings up the case of living primary substances such as living animals. The heart of a living animal is a proper part of it. Now does it depend for its existence on the whole animal of which it is a proper part? Is it true, as Kevin says, that the heart is identity-dependent on the animal whose heart it is?
I don't think so. Otherwise, there couldn't be heart transplants. Suppose Tom, whose heart is healthy, dies in a car crash. Tom's heart is transplanted into Jerry whose diseased heart has been removed. Clearly, one and the same heart passes from Tom to Jerry. Therefore, the heart in question is not identity-dependent on being Tom's heart. In principle if not in practice, every part of an animal can be transplanted. So it seems as if the whole is not metaphysically prior to its parts in the case of animals.
Accidents and Parts
Tom's smile cannot 'migrate' from Tom to Jerry, but his heart can (with a little help from the cardiologists). This is the difference between an accident of a substance and a proper part of a substance. If A is an accident of substance S, then not only is A dependent for its existence on a substance, it is dependent for its existence on the very substance S of which it is an accident. This is why an accident cannot pass from one substance to another. The accidents of S cannot exist apart from S, but S can exist without those very accidents (though presumably it must have some accidents or other). So we can say that a substance is metaphysically prior to its accidents. But I don't think it is true that a substance is metaphysically/ontologically prior to its parts. The part-whole relation is different from the accident-substance relation.
So as far as I can see what I originally said is correct.
Further, you wrote, "The divine aseity, however, rules out God's being dependent on anything." Would it not be more accurate to say that divine aseity is the thesis that God's being is not dependent upon anything external and distinct from himself? If that is the case, the dependence of God (proper) upon his members (the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) would be a dependence upon nothing external to himself (unlike a Platonic rendition of God which postulates that God is dependent upon the properties he instantiates, these properties being external to himself). There is a strong strand in Christian tradition that states that the Son is God of God, that he is begotten of the Father and yet retains full divinity. If his divinity is not in jeopardy because of dependence upon the Father, why should the one God's divinity be in jeopardy because he depends upon the members of the Trinity?
The reason I said what I said is because it makes no sense to say that God is dependent on God. God can no more be dependent on himself than he can cause himself to exist. I read causa sui privatively, not positively. To say that God is causa sui is to say that he is not caused by another; it is not to say that he causes himself. 'Self-caused' is like 'self-employed': one who is self-employed does not employ himself; he is not employed by another.
For you, however, God can be said to depend on God in the sense that God as a whole depends on his proper parts, the Persons of the Trinity. The problem, however, is that you are assuming the mereological model that I am questioning. You are assuming that the one God is a whole of parts and the each of the Persons (F, S, HS) is a proper part of the whole.
And isn't your second criticism inconsistent with your first? Your first point was that a whole is prior to its parts. But now you are saying that God can depend on God by depending in his proper parts.
The president, who has often said he will work around Congress, also justifies his executive bender by telling us that Americans are clamoring for more limits on gun ownership. So what? These rights — in what Piers Morgan might call that "little book" — were written down to protect the citizenry from not only executive overreach but also vagaries of public opinion. Didn't Alexander Hamilton and James Madison warn us against the dangerous "passions" of the mob? It is amazing how many times this president uses majoritarian arguments to rationalize executive overreach.
That is a very important point. We are a republic. Not everything is up for democratic grabs.
And really, speaking of ginning up fear: "If there's even one life that can be saved, then we've got an obligation to try," the president said, deploying perhaps the biggest platitude in the history of nannyism. Not a single one of the items Obama intends to implement — legislative or executive — would have stopped Adam Lanza's killing spree or, most likely, any of the others. Using fear and a tragedy to further ideological goals was by no means invented by Obama, but few people have used it with such skill.
A platitude? Not the right word. What Obama is quoted as saying is an absurdity and illustrates once again what a bullshitter he is. Many lives would be saved by banning mororcycles, skydiving, mountaineering, and so on. But a thoughtful person does not consider merely the positive upshot of banning X but the negative consequences as well such as the infringement of liberty. A rational person considers costs along with benefits.
If you need further proof that leftism is emotion-driven, consider the latest Obamination, the call for a ban on high capacity magazines, an abomination which the fascist-in-chief may try to ram though under Executive Order. I take it that these are magazines the capacity of which is in excess of seven rounds.
(By the way, you liberals, and especially you liberal journalists, need to learn the correct terminology: 'magazine' not 'clip.' 'Round' not 'bullet.' The bullet is the projectile. To confuse the bullet with the round is to commit a pars pro toto fallacy.)
When I ranted about this over lunch with Mike V. on Saturday, he made an interesting comparison. I had made the point that it is very easy to change out a depleted mag. A skilled shooter can do it in a second or two. Suppose I have a semi-auto pistol with a loaded seven-round mag. I have two more loaded mags of the same capacity in my right pocket and two more in my left. Within a minute or two I can get off 5 X 7 = 35 shots. (My firepower increases if I have a second or third semi-auto on my person.) Plenty of time to commit mayhem in what liberal boneheads have made a 'gun-free zone.' (The sign ought to read: Gun-Free Zone Except for Criminals.)
Mike brought up Gotham's benighted mayor, Mr Bloomberg, and his call for the banning of 32 oz sodas. Mike said, "You just order two 16 oz. drinks."
Exactly. Get the comparison? Banning high capacity magazines is as foolish a feel-good proposal as banning 'high capacity' soft drink containers.
Why is the high capacity mag ban foolish? Because it does nothing to solve the problem. But it is worse than foolish since it is one more violation of the liberties of law-abiding citizens, one more step on the road to full-tilt statism.
It is also foolish because it promotes a black market for the items banned and tends to undermine respect for law and for the rule of law.
Laws ought ought be (i) few in number, (ii) reasonable in content, (ii) intelligible to the average citizen, (iv) enforceable, and (v) enforced. When dumbass libruls pass stupid feel-good laws because they feel that they just have to do something, the result is an erosion of respect for law and an increase in readership of Thoreau's essay on civil disobedience.
And another thing. Passing laws is easy and beloved by the feel-gooders on both sides of the aisle. Enforcement is much more difficult and here liberals whether Dems or Repubs demonstrate that it is feeling alone that drives them. Enforce existing laws and attach severe penalties to their breaking. Why hasn't the Islamist murderer, Nidal Malik Hasan, the Fort Hood shooter, been executed?
Leftists like to call conservatives fascists, but it is the fascism of the Left that is taking hold. Two more pieces of evidence as part of a massive cumulative case:
At a news conference on Monday, exactly one month after the school massacre in Newtown, Conn., Mr. Obama said a task force led by Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. had “presented me now with a list of sensible, common-sense steps that can be taken to make sure that the kinds of violence we saw at Newtown doesn’t happen again. He added: “My starting point is not to worry about the politics. My starting point is to focus on what makes sense, what works.”
The quotation is ungrammatical ("kinds of violence . . . doesn't"), but that is the least of it. How can any serious individual speak of making sure that events such as Newtown don't happen again? Every reasonable person knows that there will be similar occurrences. The astonishing attitude betrayed here is that the federal government, by merely passing laws, can eliminate evil from the world. The risibility of this notion is compounded by the content of the laws being proposed. Must I point out that behind this foolishness is lust for power? The Left is totalitarian from the ground up and this is just further proof of the fact.
To say that sales of guns and ammo and accessories are brisk would be an understatement. Expect it to become brisker still. POTUS has just given the people another reason to arm themselves.
This article, by Anthony Gregory, is well worth reading although it gets off to a somewhat rocky start:
I think the most conspicuous problem is the glorification not of guns or fictional violence, but of actual violence. America is a militarized society, seat of the world’s empire. The U.S. government is always at war with a handful of countries.
First of all, we need to distinguish between the glorification of fictional violence and the fictional glorification of violence. What contemporary film makers glorify is violence, actual violence of the most brutal and sadistic sort, not fictional violence. A movie such as Hostel II (cannibal scene) that depicts a man being eaten alive by a man is not depicting a fictional representation of a man being eaten alive, but a man being eaten alive. Of course, a violent and sadistic movie is fiction, but if it is good fiction, it draws the reader in and involves him in the action, degrading, desensitizing, and dehumanizing him. That people find this evil stuff entertaining shows how how morally corrupt they have become. This is the ultimate circenses for the depraved masses. (See Alypius and the Gladiators) [Correction 16 January: Not the ultimate circenses, for that would be the gladiatorial combat of ancient Rome or something similar. We haven't slipped that far, not yet.]
I say this because it is important not to downplay the role played by too many film makers and other cultural polluters in contributing to a culture or unculture in which sensitive, highly alienated kids like Adam Lanza, who are products of broken homes, and brought up without moral guidance in politicaslly correct schools in which our Judeo-Christian heritage has been expunged, can be pushed over the edge.
That being said, Gregory makes some very important points, despite his being a bit too libertarian for my conservative taste. Excerpts (emphasis added):
At least as alarming as the finger pointing have been the particular solutions most commentators have immediately gravitated toward. Progressives immediately began accusing conservatives of cutting mental health funding, and conservatives immediately fired back that civil libertarians have eroded the capacity of government to involuntarily commit those suspected of mental illness. This is, I think, perhaps the most disturbing reaction in the long run. Great strides have been made in the last half century to roll back the totalitarianism of mandatory psychiatric commitment. For much of modern history, hundreds of thousands were denied basic human rights due to their unusual behavior, most of it peaceful in itself. Lobotomies and sterilization were common, as were locking people into hellish psychiatric gulags where they were repeatedly medicated against their will, stripped of any sanity they previously had. The most heroic libertarian in recent years may have been the recently departed Thomas Szasz, who stood against mainstream psychiatry’s unholy alliance with the state, correctly pointing out that the system of mandatory treatment was as evil and authoritarian as anything we might find in the prison system or welfare state.
[. . .]
Meanwhile, statists on both the left and right called for the national security state to put armed guards in every school in America. More militarized policing is not the answer. Barbara Boxer, California’s hyper-statist Democrat, called for National Guard troops in the schools. Yet the spokesman of the NRA, instead of doing what it could to diffuse the hysteria and defend the right to bear arms, added his voice to this completely terrible idea, demanding utopian solutions and scapegoating when he should have been a voice of reason. The main difference between his proposal and Boxer’s would be the uniforms worn by the armed guards.
I agree. Turning schools into armed camps is an awful idea, though not as stupid as making them 'gun-free' zones.
Government armed guards will not necessarily make the schools safer, though. Central planning doesn’t work. The Fort Hood shooter managed to kill twelve people in 2009, despite the military base epitomizing the very pinnacle of government security. And now we see President Obama toying with the exact proposal aggressively pushed by the NRA—more surveillance and police, funded by the federal government, to turn America’s schools into Orwellian nightmares.
Although both conservatives and progressives have responded to this tragedy in generally bad ways, and there seems to be wide agreement on a host of downright terrifying police state proposals, I don’t want to imply that both sides have been equally bad. As awful as the law-and-order conservatives have been, the progressives have been far worse, agreeing with most of the bad conservative proposals but then adding their own pet issue to the agenda: disarming the general population.
The right to bear arms is a human rights issue, a property rights issue, a personal safety issue. The way that one mass murderer has been turned into a poster boy for the agenda of depriving millions of Americans of the right to own weapons that virtually none of them will ever use to commit a crime is disgusting, and seems to be rooted in some sort of cultural bigotry. Nothing else would easily explain the invincible resistance to logical arguments such as: rifles are rarely used in crimes, gun control empowers the police state over the weak, and such laws simply do not work against criminals, full stop. Rifles are easier to manufacture than methamphetamine, and we know how well the drug war has stopped its proliferation, and 3D printing will soon make it impossible to stop people from getting the weapons they want.
I will be doing some more writing about gun rights in the next few weeks, as it appears that not for the first time in my life, I was totally wrong about something. I had suspected that the left had given up on this issue, more or less, and Obama—whose first term was overall half-decent on gun rights—would not want to touch it. We shall see what happens, but it appears that the progressives have been lying in wait for an excuse to disarm Americans and have happily jumped on the chance.
Many left-liberals will claim they don’t want to ban all guns, and I think most are honest when they say so. Polls indicate that 75% or so of Americans oppose a handgun ban. Maybe there has been some genuine improvement on this issue, although I do have my doubts about the honesty of those who claim they would stop at rifles and high capacity mags, which are implicated in a handful of crimes compared to the thousands killed by people using handguns.
In any event, the core mentality of the gun controllers is as dangerous as ever. In response to a horrific mass murder of around 30 people, they are calling for liberties to be sacrificed in the name of security, apparently impervious to the logical problems with their proposals. When terrorists murdered a hundred times as many people in September 2001, many of these same progressives sensibly pointed out that those who would sacrifice liberty for security will wind up with neither, a line from Franklin. Yet the same logic should apply here. If 9/11 should have taught us anything, it’s that you cannot have total security, certainly with the state in charge of everyone’s safety. Nineteen men with boxcutters murdered 3,000 people. In a world with cars, gasoline, fertilizer, gunpowder, and steel, it is simply impossible to eliminate every threat, rifles being one of the smallest ones out there. Since 9/11 we have lost so many freedoms, have seen our police forces turn into nationalized standing armies with tanks and battle rifles, have undergone mass molestation and irradiation at our airports, have seen the national character twisted to officially sanction torture, indefinite detention, and aggressive wars. What will we see happen in the name of stopping troubled young people from engaging in smaller acts of mass murder? Much the way that conservatives led the charge toward fascism after 9/11, with liberals protesting a little at first only to seemingly accept the bulk of the surveillance state and anti-terror national security apparatus, I fear that today’s progressives are leading the stampede toward an even more totalitarian future, with the conservatives playing defense but caving, first on militarized schools, then on mental health despotism, then on victim disarmament.
Perhaps if after 9/11 the conservatives had focused on allowing airlines to manage their own security, even permitting passengers with guns on planes, instead of doubling the intrusiveness of the police state, we’d be in better shape today. But now the progressives are running the show, the SWAT teams have become more ruthless, the domestic drones have been unleashed, the wars abroad have escalated, and the same federal institutions whose gun control measures left American civilians dead at Ruby Ridge and Waco can expect new targets throughout the land. The bipartisan police state commences, now that the left has gotten its own 9/11.
