No contest, right? And she's faster than me! She claims a sub-4 marathon (26.2 miles in under four hours). On Thanksgiving 2009 it took me over an hour (1:07:37) to crank through a 10 K (6.2 miles). My excuses? It was unseasonably hot and I was 10 lbs overweight. Plus I have no athletic talent. I am powered by will alone
Like her, I favor ASICS gel running shoes: anima sana in corpore sano.
Three questions: Is global warming occurring? Is is anthropogenic? Is it sufficiently serious to warrant massive action? There is no good reason to think that all three questions have an affirmative answer. Here is an article by Richard S. Lindzen, professor of meteorology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
What is truly disturbing in all this is the extent of leftist ideological infiltration of science. But this is nothing new. See Stalin on Philology.
To put it polemically, the gas bags of global warming are CO2mmies. The point of this bit of invective is to highlight the anti-free market, totalitarian, and politically correct ideological nature of this so-called 'science.'
Seize the day and squeeze it for all the juice it's worth. Repeat tomorrow. And no day without a little Emerson:
. . . we should not postpone and refer and wish, but do broad justice where we are, by whomsoever we deal with, accepting our actual companions and circumstances, however humble or odious, as the mystic officials to whom the universe has delegated its whole pleasure for us. (From "Experience")
Now that is good writing.
It rankles this curmudgeon when the following beautiful line of Henry David Thoreau is butchered:
In wildness is the preservation of the world.
Again and again, people who cannot read what is on the page substitute 'wilderness' for 'wildness.' People see what they want to see, or expect to see. Here is an example of double butchery I found recently:
In wilderness is the preservation of Mankind.
(Warren Macdonald, A Test of Will, Greystone Books, 2004, p. 145.)
Loosely translated: No pain, no gain. Der Fleiß (Fleiss) is German for diligence. Thus 'Heidi Fleiss' is a near aptronym, diligent as she was in converting concupiscence into currency.
Another interesting German word is Sitzfleisch. It too is close in meaning to diligence, staying power. Fleisch is meat and Sitz, seat, is from the verb sitzen, to sit. One who has Sitzfleisch, then, has sitting meat. Think of a scholarly grind who sits for long hours poring over tome after tome of arcana.
And that reminds me of a story. Max Scheler and Nicolai Hartmann were German philosophers of high repute, though Scheler was more the genius and Hartmann more the grind. As the story goes, Scheler once disparaged Hartmann thusly, "My genius and your Sitzfleisch would make a great philosopher!"
Blaise Pascal, Pensées #329:
Man is neither angel nor beast; and the misfortune is that he who would act the angel acts the beast.
The first half of the thought is unexceptionable: man is indeed neither angel nor beast, but, amphibious as he is between matter and spirit, a hybrid and a riddle to himself.
The second half of Pascal's thought, however, is unfair to the beasts. No beast can act the beast the way a man can. No beast is bestial in the way a man can be bestial. The difference is that while the beast acts according to his nature, man freely degrades himself contrary to his nature. Having done so, he allows his freely indulged passions to suborn his intellect: he constructs elaborate rationalizations of his self-degradation.
It is not our animality that corrupts us but our free misuse of our animality, a misuse that derives from our spirtuality.
CO2mmunist.
No one preaches self-denial anymore. We have become a nation of moral wimps. We need a taste of the strenuosity of yesteryear, and who better to serve it up than our very own William James, he of the Golden Age of American philosophy:
Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every day. That is, be systematically heroic in little unnecessary points, do every day or two something for no other reason than its difficulty, so that, when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved and untrained to stand the test. Asceticism of this sort is like the insurance which a man pays on his house and goods. The tax does him no good at the time, and possibly may never bring him a return. But, if the fire does come, his having paid it will be his salvation from ruin. So with the man who has daily inured himself to habits of concentrated attention, energetic volition, and self-denial in unnecessary things. He will stand like a tower when everything rocks around him, and his softer fellow-mortals are winnowed like chaff in the blast.
We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone. Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never-so-little scar. The drunken Rip Van Winkle, in Jefferson's play, excuses himself for every fresh dereliction by saying, "I won't count this time!" Well, he may not count it, and a kind Heaven may not count it; but it is being counted none the less. Down among his nerve-cells and fibres the molecules are counting it, registering and storing it up to be used against him when the next temptation comes.
At James' door we receive bread. At Quine's a stone. How American philosophy has fallen off since the Golden Age of James, Royce, and Peirce.
The desert fathers of old believed in demons because of their experiences in quest of the "narrow gate" that only few find. They sought to perfect themselves and so became involved as combatants in unseen warfare. They felt as if thwarted in their practices by oppponents both malevolent and invisible. The moderns do not try to perfect themselves and so the demons leave them alone.
Conversation about trivial matters can be idle and useless, and usually is. But the same is true of conversation about 'deep matters.' In some moods, intellectual and spiritual conversation is more offensive to me than mundane chit-chat. Talk can degenerate into profanation. We need periodic recuperation from it in the form of entry into silence.
When we say that an argument is valid we are saying something about its logical form. To put it epigrammatically, validity is a matter of form. We are saying that its form is such that no (actual or possible) argument of that form has true premises and a false conclusion. Validity is necessarily truth preserving. I just used the expression, 'its form.' But since an argument can have two or more forms, a better formulation is this:
1. An argument is valid iff it instantiates a valid argument-form.
Given (1), some will be tempted by
2. An argument is invalid iff it instantiates an invalid argument-form.
But (2) is false. After all, every (noncircular) argument instantiates an invalid form. 'Some cameras are digital devices; therefore, some digital devices are cameras,' which is obviously valid, instantiates the invalid form p therefore q. Similarly, every valid syllogism has the invalid form p, q, therefore r. Consider this argument:
3. Zeno is famous for his paradoxes of motion
4. Zeno is a Stoic
—–
5. Some Stoic is famous for his paradoxes of motion.
Is this argument valid? The argument is plainly valid inasmuch as it instantiates a valid form. The problem with the argument, of course, is that it is unsound: if (3) is true, then (4) is false, and if (4) is true, then (3) is false. For (3) to be true, 'Zeno' must refer to Zeno of Elea, but for (4) to be true, 'Zeno' must refer to Zeno of Citium. And of course neither can refer to my late cat, Zeno (may peace be upon him).
Now consider this argument:
6. If God created something, then God created everything
7. God created everything
—–
8. God created something.
This instantiates the formal fallacy of affirming the consequent. Is the argument therefore invalid? No! For it also instantiates a valid form:
Everything is such that: Fx
—–
Something is such that: Fx.
In his SEP entry on propositions, Matthew McGrath presents what he calls the 'Metaphysics 101' argument for propositions. Rather than quote him, I will put the argument in my own more detailed way.
1. With respect to any occurrent (as opposed to dispositional) belief, there is a distinction between the mental act of believing and the content believed. Since believing is 'intentional' as philosophers use this term, i.e., necessarily object-directed, there cannot be an act of believing that is not directed upon some object or content. To believe is to believe something, that the door has been left ajar, for example. Nevertheless, the believing and the believed are distinct.
3. There are occurrent beliefs.
Therefore
4. There are propositions.
To understand this argument, one must understand that no particular theory of propositions is being argued for. (It even allows for such wacky theories of propositions as that propositions are sets of possible worlds. That penetrating minds have championed such theories shows that such minds can descend into wackiness under various materialist and extensionalist pressures.) The argument is to the conclusion that something or other must play the roles of truth-bearer, object of such attitudes as knowing and believing, and ground of the possibility of two or more minds' coming to believe or know the same thing. It is an argument for the existence of propositions that leaves open their exact nature. (Analogy to be explored: in the way Aquinas' God-arguments leave open the exact , and indeed largely unknowable, nature of God.)
Perhaps the argument could be strengthened by restricting it to de dicto as opposed to de re beliefs. Compare 'S believes of some black that he is articulate' with 'S believes that some black is articulate.' The first is de re, the second de dicto. The first does not entail the second. Suppose S is a redneck who believes that no black is articulate. He hears a man on the radio speaking in an articulate manner, a man who, unbeknownst to S is black. It follows that S believes of some black man that he is articulate without believing that some black man is articulate.
Be this as it may. Like any argument, the Metaphysics 101 argument for propositions can be countered in several ways. Alan Rhoda discusses one way in his post, Propositions and Make-Believe. My own view is that the argument is more credible than any of its attempted counterings. More later.
1. The lowest grade is that of petitionary prayer for material benefits. One asks for mundane benefits whether for oneself, or, as in the case of intercessionary prayer, for another. In its crassest forms it borders on idolatry and superstition. A skier who prays for snow, for example, makes of God a supplier of mundane benefits, and this amounts to idolatry, the worshipping of a false god.
Joseph Joubert, The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, tr. Paul Auster, p. 37:
What good is modesty? — It makes us seem more beautiful when we are beautiful, and less ugly when we are ugly.
Yet again from Joseph Joubert:
Properly speaking, man inhabits only his head and his heart. All other places are vainly before his eyes, at his sides, and under his feet: he himself is not there at all. (Notebooks, p. 126)
