Author: Bill Vallicella

The Aporetics of Artifacts: Puzzling Over Van Inwagen’s Denial of Artifacts

This post is a sequel to Van Inwagen on the Ship of Theseus.  Peter van Inwagen, Material Beings (Cornell UP, 1990), p. 31, writes: 

The question 'In virtue of what do these n blocks compose this house of blocks?' is a question about n + 1 objects, one of them radically different from the others. But the question 'What could we do to get these n blocks to compose something? is a question about n rather similar objects. . . . . questions of the former sort turn our minds to various metaphysical and linguistic questions about the "special" n + 1st [read: n + 1th] object and our words for it: What are the identity conditions for houses of blocks?

Why does van Inwagen think that a house of blocks is an object radically different from the blocks that compose it? And why does he think that if there are, say, 1000 blocks, then in the place where the house is, there are 1001 objects? Not only do I find these notions repugnant to my philosophical sense, I suspect that it is their extremism that motivates van Inwagen to recoil from them and embrace something equally absurd, namely, that there are no such things as houses of blocks or inanimate concrete partite entities generally. 

In other words, if one begins by assuming that if a house of blocks, for example, is a whole of parts, then it is an object radically different from the objects that compose it, an object numerically additional to the objects that compose it; then, recoiling from these extreme positions, one will be tempted to embrace an equal but opposite extremism according to which there are no such inanimate partite entities as houses of blocks. What then should we say about a house of blocks?

First off, it is not identical to any one of its proper parts. Second, it is not identical to the mereological sum of its parts: the parts exist whether or not the house exists. From this it follows that there is a sense in which the house is 'something more' than its parts. But surely it is not an object "radically different" from, or numerically additional to, its proper parts. If there is a house of 1000 blocks in a place, there are not 1001 objects or entities in that place. After all, the house is composed of the blocks, and of nothing else.

So on the one hand the house is 'something more' than its constituent blocks, while on the other hand it is not a "radically different" object above and beyond them. Think of how absurd it would be for me to demand that you show me your house after you have shown me every part of it. "You've shown me every single part of your house, but where is the bloody house?"

The house, thought not identical to the blocks that compose it,  is not wholly diverse from the blocks that compose it .  The house is the blocks arranged housewise. The house is not the blocks, and the house is not some further entity "radically different" from the blocks. The house is just the blocks in a certain familiar arrangement. Should we conclude that the house exists or that it does not exist? I say it exists: the house is the blocks arranged housewise, and the existence of the house is the housewise unity of the blocks. Van Inwagen seems to think that there is no house, there are just the blocks. (Of course, he doesn't believe in the blocks either since they too are inanimate partite entities; but to keep the discussion simple, we may assume that the blocks are simples.)  

Now if it is allowed that the house exists, it seems clear that the house does not exist in the way the blocks do. But this does not strike me as a good reason for saying that the house does not exist at all. What is wrong with saying that the house is a dependent existent? And what is wrong with saying that about partite entities generally? They exist, but they do not exist in addition to their parts, but as the unity or connectedness of their parts. Saying this, we avoid van Inwagen's absurd thesis that inanimate partite entities do not exist. Of course, this commits me to saying that there are at least two modes of existence, a dependent mode and an independent mode. I suspect van Inwagen would find such a distinction incoherent. But that is a topic for a separate post.

The problem can be set forth as an aporetic pentad:

1. The house is not identical to the blocks that compose it.

2. The house is not wholly diverse from the blocks that compose it; it is not an object numerically additional to the blocks that compose it:  given that the house is composed of n blocks, the house itself is not an n + 1th object.

3. The house exists.

4. The constituent blocks exist.

5.  'Exists' is univocal as between wholes and parts: wholes and their parts exist in the same sense.

Each limb has a strong claim on our acceptance.  But they cannot all be true.  Any four of the propositions, taken together, entails the negation of the remaining one.  For example, if the first four are all true, then the fifth must be false.  To solve the problem, one of the limbs must be rejected.  But which one? 

To me it seems obvious that the first four are all true.  So I reject (5).  Rejecting (5), I can say that the house exists as the connectedness of the blocks.  Thus the mode of existence of the whole is different from the mode of existence of its simple parts.  But this solution requires us to believe in modes of existence, which is sure to inspire opposition among analytic philosophers.  Van Inwagen, if I understand him, denies (2) and (3) while accepting the others.

But van I's solution is just crazy, is it not?  Mine is less crazy.  But perhaps you, dear reader, have a better suggestion.

 

Which Islam Will Prevail in America?

Required reading.  Excerpts:

Most of the mosques and Islamic centers in our country are controlled, to a greater or lesser degree, by the Muslim Brotherhood and its satellites. The North American Islamic Trust (NAIT) was established in the early Seventies to buy up property for the establishment of American mosques and “Islamic centers,” the latter being what the Brotherhood calls “the axis” of the Islamist movement in America. [. . .]

The Kingdom and the Brotherhood have combined for a half-century to put American Muslim communities in a stranglehold. They proselytize a fundamentalist interpretation of Islam — an amalgam of Saudi Wahhabism and Brotherhood Salafism — that is virulently anti-Western. Its instruction to Muslims in the United States, Canada, and Europe is voluntary apartheid: Immigrate but don’t integrate, infiltrate but don’t assimilate. [. . .]

It is the Brotherhood’s objective to thread sharia through American law and culture. This mission drives imam Feisal Rauf’s [the guy behind the Ground Zero mosque provocation] work, as documented by the Center for Security Policy’s Christine Brim in an eye-popping report at Andrew Breitbart’s Big Peace website.

Van Inwagen on the Ship of Theseus

Van Inwagen Peter van Inwagen's Material Beings (Cornell UP, 1990) is a very strange book, but he is a brilliant man, so one can expect to learn something from it. A central claim is that artifacts such as tables and chairs and ships do not exist. One can appreciate  that if there are no ships then the ancient puzzle about identity known as the Ship of Theseus has a very quick (dis)solution. 

The Ship of Theseus is a puzzle about diachronic artifact identity. Here is one version. You have a ship, or a rowboat, or any object, composed entirely of wooden planks. You remove one of the planks and replace it with an aluminum plank of the same size. The wooden plank is placed in a warehouse. After this minor replacement, you have a ship and indeed numerically the same ship as the one you started with. It is not a numerically different ship. Now replace a second wooden plank with an aluminum plank, and place the second wooden plank in the warehouse. Again, the numerical identity of the original ship has been preserved. Continue the replacement process until all of the wooden planks have been replaced with aluminum planks. You now have a wholly aluminum ship that is presumably numerically identical to the original wholly wooden ship despite the fact that none of the original matter is to be found in the aluminum ship. After all, the aluminum ship 'grew out of' the original wooden ship by minor changes each of which is identity-preserving.

Now take the wooden planks from the warehouse and assemble them in the form of a ship and in such a way that the planks bear the same relations to one another as the planks in the original wooden ship bore to one another. You now have two ships, a wooden one and an aluminum one. The question is: which of these ships is identical to the original wooden one?

Suppose the two ships collide on the high seas, and suppose the captain of the original ship had taken a solemn vow to go down with his ship. Where does his duty lie? With the wooden ship or with the aluminum one? Is the original ship identical to the resultant aluminum ship? One will be tempted to say 'yes' since the aluminum ship 'grew out' of the original wooden ship by minor transformations each of which was identity-preserving. Or is the original ship identical to the wooden ship that resulted from the re-assembly of the wooden planks? After all, it consists of the original matter arranged in the original way. Since the resultant wooden and aluminum ships are numerically distinct, they cannot both be identical to the original ship.

Van Inwagen makes short work of the puzzle: "There are no ships, and hence there are no puzzles about the identities of ships." (128) One way van Inwagen supports this bizarre solution is by re-telling the story in language that does not make even apparent reference to ships. Here is his retelling:

Once upon a time, there were certain planks that were arranged shipwise. Call then the First Planks. . . . One of the First Planks was removed from the others and placed in a field. Then it was replaced by a new plank; that is, a carpenter caused the new plank and the remaining First Planks to be arranged shipwise, and in just such a way that the new plank was in contact with the same planks that the removed planks had been in contact with, and at exactly the same points. Call the planks that were then arranged shipwise the Second Planks. A plank that was both one of the First Planks and one of the Second Planks was removed from the others and placed in the field and replaced (according to the procedure laid down above), with the consequence that certain planks, the Third Planks, were arranged shipwise. Then a plank that was one of the First Planks and one of the Second Planks and one of the Third Planks . . . . This process was repeated till all the First Planks were in the field. Then the First Planks were caused to be arranged shipwise, and in just such a way that each of them was in contact with the same planks it had been in contact with when the First Planks had last been arranged shipwise, and was in contact with them at just the same points. (128-129)

If I understand what van Inwagen is claiming here, it is that there is nothing in the standard telling of the story, a version of which I presented above, that is not captured in his re-telling. But since there is no mention of any ships in the re-telling, no puzzle about ship-identity can arise. Perhaps van Inwagen's point could be put by saying that the puzzle about identity is an 'artifact' of a certain way of talking that can be paraphased away. Instead of talking about ships, we can talk about shipwise arrangements of planks. The planks do not then compose a ship, he thinks, and so there is no whole of which they are proper parts, and consequently no question about how this whole maintains its diachronic identity under replacement of its parts.

What are we to say about van Inwagen's dissolution of the puzzle? What I find dubious is van Inwagen's claim that ". . . at no time do two or more of these planks compose anything, and no plank is a proper part of anything." (129) This strikes me as plainly false. If the First Planks are arranged shipwise, then there is a distinction beween the First Planks and their shipwise arrangement. The latter is the whole ship and the former are its proper parts. So how can van Inwagen claim that the planks do not compose a ship? Van Inwagen seems to think that if the planks were parts of a whole, and there were n planks, then the whole would be an n + 1 th entity. Rejecting this extreme, he goes to the other extreme: there is no whole of parts. If there were ships, they would be wholes of parts, but there are no artifactual wholes of parts, so there are no ships. The idea seems to be that when we build an artifact like a ship we are not causing something new to come into existence; we are merely re-arranging what already exists. If so, then although a ship's planks exist, the ship does not exist. Consider what van Inwagen says on p. 35:

If I bring two cubes into contact so that the face of one is conterminous with the face of the other, have I thereby brought into existence a solid that is twice as long as it is wide? Or have I merely rearranged the furniture of the earth without adding to it?

Van Inwagen seems to be saying that when it comes to artifacts, there is only rearrangement, no 'addition to existence.' As a general thesis, this strikes me as false. A ship is more than its planks, and van Inwagen seems to concede as much with his talk of a shipwise arrangement of planks; but this shipwise arrangement brings something new into being, namely, a thing that has causal powers that its constituents do not have. For example, a boat made of metal planks properly arranged will float, while the planks themselves will not float.

How Far Does Religious Toleration Extend?

Suppose that there were a religion whose aim was to dominate the world and suppress every other religion.  Would we who value toleration be under any obligation to tolerate such a religion?  Of course not.  Toleration does not extend to the toleration of the intolerant.  Is there such a religion?  According to Farhad Khosrokhavar, Inside Jihadism: Understanding Jihadi Movements Worldwide (Paradigm 2009, p. 22):

In the twentieth century, one of the first to insist that Islam entails its imposition on humanity was Seyed Qutb, one of the modern forefathers of Jihadism . . . . He stated that Islam summons to worship no one else but Allah . . . . This implies the relentless fight against all idols until Allah's reign is set up on earth [ . . .]

The war on idolatry (taqut) is, in his interpretation, the most important part of Islam, taking precedence over the other principles. From this view, all of modernity is based on the worship of idols and, therefore, illegitimate, necessitating that Jihad wipe out its idolatrous tendencies. 

Jihad is not one of the five pillars of Islam.  But recent jihadists interpret the first pillar in a manner to require jihad.  "For them [recent jihadist intellectuals] the first Islamic pillar, the Unity of Allah (Tawhid) makes it compulsory for Muslims to wage the Jihad against infidels." (p. 21) 

I will be told that not all who identify as Muslims take this radical view.  True, but they are not the problem.  The Jihadists are the problem.  And we have reason to think that they represent the essence of Islam with the so-called 'moderates' being simply those who do not take the core message with full seriousness.  To the extent that Islam takes on Jihadist contours, to the extent that Islam entails its imposition on humanity, it cannot and ought not be tolerated by the West.  Indeed, no religion that attempts to suppress other religions can or ought to be  tolerated, including Christianity.  We in the West do, or at least should, believe that competition among religions in a free marketplace of ideas is a good thing. 

My own view is that no extant religion can legitimately claim to be the true religion; the true religion  has yet to be worked out.  In pursuit of that goal we need to make use of all available materials from all the best traditions.  Perhaps even Islam, as crude as it is, has something to teach us.

 

Kierkegaard’s Fear

Sorenkierkegaard1 Kierkegaard dreaded ending up the property and preserve of professional scholars. But who reads him apart from professors of philosophy, of religion, of divinity, of Danish literature, and their students? The professors read him for professional purposes, to make a living; the students also read him for professional purposes, to prepare for making a living. His works have become fodder for the career game, just as he feared. But there is something worse, as S. K. would be the first to point out, namely, a man's filling his belly from the fact that another man was crucified. The Kierkegaard scholar merely fills his belly from the fact that a man reflected lifelong on what it might mean to follow the one who was crucified.

Pope Benedict’s Regensburg Speech and Muslim Oversensitivity

This is a slightly redacted version of a piece first posted on 18 September 2006 at the old PowerBlogs site.  I repost it not only to save it for my files, but also because it it important to remember not only the successful and unsuccessful acts of Islamist terrorism worldwide, but also the many incidents which betray the illiberal and anti-Enlightenment values of our Islamist opponents (e.g., the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, the Danish cartoon 'caper,' etc. etc. The analog to the fatwa would be the Pope putting a price on the head of Andres Serrano, the 'artist' famous notorious for his 'Piss Christ.') 

……………

People need to face the fact that Western civilization is under serious threat from militant Islamic fanaticism. (And it may be coming to a theater near you.) Yet another recent indication of the threat is the unreasoning umbrage taken by many in the Islamic world over a mere  QUOTATION Pope Benedict XVI employs in his address at the University of Regensburg entitled, "The Best of Greek Thought is an Integral Part of Christian Faith."

Benedict's talk is only tangentially about Islam; it is primarily about the role of reason in the posing and answering of the God question, and about whether Christianity should be dehellenized. The Pope begins by mentioning a dialogue "by the erudite Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus and an educated Persian on the subject of Christianity and Islam, and the truth of both." Then comes the 'offending' passage (bolding added):

Continue reading “Pope Benedict’s Regensburg Speech and Muslim Oversensitivity”

Can Only the Mortalist Love?

From the mail: 

A friend of mine (a philosophy professor) and I were discussing issues of immortality, meaning, and love on Facebook. I explained to him that the love I feel for others in some sense 'seeks' immortality, as the depth of the feeling is such that without that belief, love would be almost too painful for me to bear. He expressed a diametrically opposed view, wherein love REQUIRES that we acknowledge the mortality of both the other and ourselves. This is, he said, because time is only a limited commodity and the time we spend with someone else is only valuable because there is a limited amount of it, and so spending time with someone is only really an act of love for the one for whom time is extremely limited.
 
Your friend seems to be maintaining that only a mortalist (one who maintains that bodily death spells the end of a person) can truly be said to love another person.  Your friend's argument seems to be this:
 
1. The time spent with the beloved is valuable only because it is limited; therefore,
 
2. One cannot love without acknowledging the mortality of both lover and beloved.
 
First of all, I would say that this is a non sequitur.  For even if we suppose that (1) is true, (2) is obviously false.  Gabriel Marcel did not acknowledge the mortality of himself or his wife, and yet he loved his wife.  (On this topic, Marcel is one of the people to read.)  Whether or not love is genuine cannot hinge on whether one is right or wrong about the mortalism/immortalism question.  It would be both churlish and absurd to say to Geach and Anscombe, "You two don't really love each other because you are immortalists!"
 
Your friend might respond by saying that the intensity of a love believed to be undying must be less than the intensity of a love believed to be as mortal as the lovers.  To this I have two responses.  First, the question of intensity is not the same as the question of whether the love is genuine.  The genuineness of love varies independently of its intensity.  Second, it is not obvious that a love believed to end with the lovers must be less intense. One could easily argue the opposite:  if I believe that my love cannot survive bodily death, then I am more likely to practice something like Buddhist nonattachment with respect to the beloved and with respect to my loving of the beloved in accordance with the 'truth' that all is impermanent and therefore  nothing is worthy of a full measure of commitment.  In other words, you could argue against your friend that it is precisely because love can conquer death that you value it as highly as you do, and that because he does not believe this, he ought to value it less.    You could say to him, "Look, if you believe that you and your love will soon pass away, then it is irrational of you to ascribe much value to yourself or your love. Impermanence does not intensify value; it argues lack of value!"
 
Saying this to your friend, you will not convince him ( I am quite sure of that!) but you will neutralize his argument and show that it is not compelling.  And that is about all one can accomplish in a philosophical discussion. But it is also all you need to accomplish to be able to show that your intuitions are rationally acceptable.
 
As for (1), it is arguably false, and for some of the same reasons I have just given.  If contact with the beloved ends utterly with death, then this could be taken to show that the contact was not so valuable  in the first place on the Platonic-Augustinian ground that impermanence argues (relative) unreality and unimportance.  I grant that this is not absolutely compelling, but it is as compelling as the opposite, namely, that impermanence increases value and importance.
 
I'm with you: love is a harbinger of Transcendence; it intimates of Elsewhere.  You won't be able to convince your friend of this, but don't let that bother you.  Any argument he can throw up, I can neutralize.
 
If you haven't read Augustine, you should.  I also recommend P. T. Geach, Truth. Love, and Immortality: An Introduction to McTaggart's Philosophy (University of California, 1979), esp. the last chapter.