Author: Bill Vallicella

Validity, Invalidity, and Logical Form

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:

The Metaphysics 101 Argument for Propositions

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.

Grades of Prayer

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.

Continue reading “Grades of Prayer”

Joubert on Mystical Experience

From The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, p. 29, tr. Paul Auster:

Forgetfulness of all earthly things, desire for heavenly things, immunity from all intensity and all disquiet, from all cares and all worries, from all trouble and all effort, the plenitude of work without agitation. The delights of feeling without the work of thought. The ravishments of ecstasy without medication. In a word, the happiness of pure spirituality in the heart of the world and amidst the tumult of the senses. It is no more than the gladness of an hour, a minute, an instant. But this instant, this minute of piety spreads its sweetness over our months and our years.

So excellent and accurate is this description of the mystical experience that I cannot doubt that the above entry records an actual experience of Joubert's.

François Fénelon

François Fénelon the Christian sounds like a Buddhist when he speaks of the annihilation of the soul in God:

Nothing would give us more delight than that God should do all his pleasure with us, provided it should always be to magnify and perfect us in our own eyes. But if we are not willing to be destroyed and annihilated, we shall never become that whole burnt offering, which is entirely consumed in the blaze of God's love.

We desire to enter into a state of pure faith, and retain our own wisdom! To be a babe, and great in our own eyes! Ah! what a sad delusion!

I am attracted by the thesis of the esoteric (transcendent) unity of all religions, a thesis argued by Frithjof Schuon. Beyond divergence of doctrine, unity. But I am also skeptical of the unity thesis. If Islam affirms the radical unicity of God, and Christianity denies it by affirming the tri-unity of God, what is the synthesis in which this thesis and that antithesis are aufgehoben? And so on down the line. How reconcile The Buddhist anatman doctrine with Christian personalism?

The Inconceivable

It is arguable that all religions and salvation-paths point to the Inconceivable and terminate in it if terminus they have. The Nibbana of the Pali Buddhists. The ontologically simple God of Thomas Aquinas. A theory of the Inconceivable would have to show that it is rationally admissible that there be something that cannot be grasped rationally. The theory would not be a grasping, but a pointing to the possibility of the Ungraspable. It would include a discursive refutation of all attempts at foreclosing on this possibility. The theory would deploy itself on the discursive plane, but the purpose of it would be to point one beyond the discursive plane, to make a place, as it were, for the possibility of the Transdiscursive.

But such a philosophical project is self-contradictory. If you say that the Inconceivable is possibly existent, then you exclude its necessary nonexistence. You make a determinate predication of the Inconceivable and therefore think it, conceive it, as having the property predicated. But then you fall into contradiction by affirming something of that of which nothing can be affirmed. There is no transcending the duality of thought if you are to think at all. A 'theory' that consists of a pointing to the Transdiscursive must needs be gibberish. The Real is exhausted by the discursively graspable. Outside it, nothing.

Is this a good objection or not?

Control Your Mind!

A thought arises. Interrogate it: Whither? To what purpose? The climber tests each foothold before putting his weight on it. So should we test each thought before living in it and losing ourselves in it. Why? Because the seed of word and deed is in the thought. To control thought is to control the seed of word and deed. Meditation, if nothing else, is a training in thought control. Daily meditation releases the mind's wonderful power of self-regulation.

The Problem of the Fugitive Thought: Write It Down Before It Escapes!

If you are blessed by a good thought, do not hesitate to write it down at once. Good thoughts are visitors from Elsewhere and like most visitors they do not like being snubbed or made to wait.

Let us say a fine aphorism flashes before your mind. There it is is fully formed. All you have to do is write it down. If you don't, you may be able to write only that an excellent thought has escaped.

"But there is more where that one came from." No doubt, but that very one may never return.

The problem arises in an acute form during the meditation hour. Properly installed on the black mat, one is installed in nondiscursivity. If philosophy is disciplined thinking, meditation is disciplined nonthinking. But then a thought, rich in content and fully formed, intrudes. You would honor it as you honor Athens. But it is the meditation hour: the time to attempt the flushing out of all thoughts without exception, the hour for rapt listening from within the depths of mental quiet. You are pulled between Athens and Benares. If you think one thought you will think two, ten, twenty and you will move farther and farther away from the thoughtless root of thinking. What to do?

If you arise from the mat to go to the desk you break the spell. But you don't want to ignore the thought. Truth must be chased down every avenue. Perhaps the solution is to keep a special notebook by the meditation mat. Write the thought down for later rumination, then get back to thougtlessness.

Dis-tracted

We are pulled towards the world, towards property, progeny, position, power, popularity, pleasure. But in some of us the pull toward the spirit is stronger and will triumph — in the end. Meanwhile we are pulled apart, dis-tracted, torn between lust for the world and love of the spirit. This is 'par for the course' and 'it comes with the terrain.' There's no turning back now. We must advance.

Great Minds and Small Matters

A great mind is not upset by a small matter. But it is only with difficulty that we avoid the vexation of the petty. The inference that our minds are paltry seems inescapable. Those who have had a glimpse of the mind's depth-dimension know that there is something wrong with remaining on the plane of the paltry. What is to be done?

Daily meditation helps. An hour of meditating on 'A great mind is not upset by a small matter,' as upon a mantram, has its effect if the meditation is repeated daily. The trick, of course, is to take the thought with you when you quit the meditation chamber. It is easy to be a monk in a monastery; the challenge lies in comporting oneself like one outside it. Just as one does not venture onto the Internet without one's cybershields up to date and at the ready, one ought not go abroad into society without the equivalent mental prophylaxis. Unless, of course, you like mental disturbance.

But you won't learn about any of this in graduate school, not even in the Sage School of Philosophy. An academic inquiry into the logic, ethics, and physics of the Stoics is not the same as a practicing of their precepts. One needs both of course: theoretical inquiry and the exercitium spirituale.

Where does one find the time for meditation in our hyperkinetic age? Better question: How can one fail to perceive the need for meditation, re-collection, contemplatio, Versenkung, Besinnung, in an age as scattered and frenetic as ours has become?

Saturday Night at the Oldies: My Darling Clementine

MyDarlingClementine1946 Saw this 1946 movie once again last night.  A heavily fictionalized version of the shootout at the O. K. Corral, it stars Victor Mature as Doc Holliday, Henry Fonda as Wyatt Earp and Walter Brennan as Old Man Clanton.  The Mexican cutie's name is 'Chihuahua.'  They don't make 'em like this anymore.

Now enjoy the song from 1884 in both of its versions together with the lyrics.  The second version features the oft-omitted last verse in which the singer, having lost his Clementine to a drowning, finds solace with her little sister.