Haven't been there, haven't done that. Have you? Would you want to?
Author: Bill Vallicella
Environmentalism as Green Socialism and Nature Idolatry
From Jeffrey T. Kuhner, The War on Capitalism:
Environmentalism has very little to do with protecting the environment. It is green socialism. Its objective is to achieve what red communism couldn't: the conquest of capitalism. Instead of central planning and a command economy, we would have a highly regulated, highly taxed bureaucratic corporatism that would stifle economic growth and individual initiative.
Beginning in the 19th century, much of the Western intelligentsia lost faith in God. The 20th century saw numerous attempts – Marxism, fascism, national socialism — to construct a society without God. They failed. Now the West's liberal elites are seeking to infuse the radical secular project with new meaning and purpose — man's salvation through the worship of Gaea, Mother Earth.
The green movement is a form of pantheism. It hopes to sacrifice prosperity, abundance and wealth at the altar of a false god.
Mr. Obama is its prophet of doom. And America is its victim.
Does Deflationism Rule Out Relativism?
This post floats the suggestion that deflationism about truth is inconsistent with relativism about truth. Not that one should be a deflationist. But it would be interesting if deflationism entailed the nonrelativity of truth.
There is a sense in which deflationary theories of truth deny the very existence of truth. For what these theories deny is that anything of a unitary and substantial nature corresponds to the predicate 'true' or 'is true.' To get a feel for the issue, start with the platitude that some of the things people say are true and some of the things people say are not true. People who say that Hitler died by his own hand in the Spring of 1945 say something true, while those who say that no Jews were gassed at Auschwitz say something that is not true. Given the platitude that there are truths and untruths, classically-inclined philosophers will inquire: What is it that all and only the truths have in common in virtue of which they are truths? What is truth? What is the property of being-true?
Fewtril #202
From The Joy of Curmudgeonry:
The sight of people competing to be victims seems to be odd and against the order of things until one considers that they are in fact competing to be victors.
This is a fine example of the art of the aphorism. It is a happy blend of terseness and truth.
The Confused Have Their Uses
Just as I learn how not to live by observing how some do live, I learn how not to think by observing how some do think. Their confusion is fodder for my clarity.
On Grades
Life is hierarchical. It is therefore unjust not to give grades. A school in which all are equal is no preparation for a life in which all are not.
Universal Health Care
I'm for universal health care: I want everyone to have health care. But the issue is not whether it would be good for all to have adequate health care, the issue is how to approach this goal. I can't see that increasing government involvement in health care delivery is the way to go. We need less government inefficiency and more market discipline. That will bring prices down while safeguarding liberty, a value liberals, despite their name, seem insufficiently appreciative of. The so-called 'public option' will lead to no option: you will have no option except to use the government plan because private insurers will most of them have been driven out of business. And so only the superrich will get the best care. The phrase 'public option' is a piece of Orwellian bullshit. Descriptive accuracy favors 'government takeover health plan' or something like that.
A Man and a Woman Look into a Mirror
I just heard it on the Dennis Prager show. "A man looks in the mirror and sees Hercules no matter how he looks. A woman looks in the mirror and sees a wreck no matter how she looks." Those aren't Prager's exact words but that's the gist of it. The first sentence, at least, is verbatim. Exactly right. Yet another aperçu from the wise and fertile mind of the best of the conservative talk jocks.
Husserl Introduces Shestov to Kierkegaard
Lev Shestov and Kierkegaard have much in common. Both are irrationalists, to mention the deepest commonality. Husserl and Kierkegaard have almost nothing in common except that both are passionate truth-seekers each in his own way. So I find it amazing that it was Edmund Husserl, of all people, who introduced Shestov to Kierkegaard's writings. As Shestov explains in In Memory of a Great Philosopher:
. . . during my visit to Freiburg [im Breisgau, where Husserl lived], learning that I had never read Kierkegaard, Husserl began not to ask but to demand – with enigmatic insistence – that I acquaint myself with the works of the Danish thinker. How was it that a man whose whole life had been a celebration of reason should have led me to Kierkegaard's hymn to the absurd? Husserl, to be sure, seems to have become acquainted with Kierkegaard only during the last years of his life. There is no evidence in his works of familiarity with any of the writings of the author of Either-Or. But it seems clear that Kierkegaard's ideas deeply impressed him.
It testifies to the stature of both men that they sought each other out for dialogue despite the unbridgeable gulf that separated them.
Silence and Wholeness
Perusing an old file of juvenilia for blog-fodder, I decided that the contents are mostly too juvenile for reproduction here. But then I came across an aphorism penned in December, 1971 when I was living in the shadow of the medieval Festung or fastness in Salzburg, Austria:
Silence is a grating clangor to the unwhole man.
Can Existence Be Analyzed in Terms of Power? Commentary on Sophist 247e
At Sophist 247e, Plato puts the following into the mouth of the Eleatic Stranger:
I suggest that anything has real being that is so constituted as to possess any sort of power either to affect anything else or to be affected, in however small a degree, by the most insignificant agent, though it be only once. I am proposing as a mark to distinguish real things that they are nothing but power. (Cornford tr.)
The gist of the passage is that what makes a thing real or existent is its (active) power to affect other things or its (passive) power to be affected by them. In sum,
D. For any x, x exists =df x is causally active or passive.
Thus everything causally active/passive exists, and only the causally active/passive exists. The definition rules out of existence all 'causally inert' items such as propositions as Frege construes them, namely, as the senses of context-free indicative sentences. And of course it rules out sets of Fregean propositions. But what about the mathematical (as opposed to commonsense) set of the books on my desks? Each of the books is existent or real by (D) and so is the object resulting from the bundling of the books together; but the set of these books is arguably abstract and thus causally inert. So if (D) is true, we cannot admit mathematical sets into our ontology. For such items do not enter into causal relations. Fregean propositions and mathematical sets are therefore putative counterexamples to (D). If these counterexamples are genuine then (D) fails extensionally: the extension of the existent is wider than the extension of the causally active/passive.
But what interests me at the moment is not the extensional correctness of (D) but a deeper question. Even if we assume that (D) is extensionally correct, i.e., that all and only existents are causally active/passive, does (D) tell us what it is for an item to exist? When we say of a thing that it exists, what are we saying about it? That it is causally active/passive? My answer is in the negative — even if we assume that all and only existents are causally active/passive.
My reason is quite simple. For an item to be capable of acting or being acted upon it must 'be there' or exist! 'Before' it can be a doer or a done-to it must exist. (The 'before' is to be taken logically not temporally.) The nonexistent cannot act or be acted upon. There is no danger that winged horses will collide with airplanes. The reason is not that winged horses are abstract or causally inert objects; the reason is that they do not exist. Winged horses, if there were any, would belong to the category of the causally active/passive. But they don't exist — which is the reason why they cannot act or be acted upon. They are not abstract items but nonexistent concrete items. Existence, therefore, is a necessary condition of an item's being a causal agent or patient. It follows that existence cannot be explicated in terms of power as per the Eleatic Stranger's suggestion. Existence is too fundamental to be explicated in terms of power — or anything else.
If you are having trouble seeing the point consider the winged horse Pegasus and his singleton {Pegasus}. Both of these items are nonexistent. One is concrete (causally active/passive) while the other is abstract. But neither can enter into causal relations. To say that Pegasus is concrete is to say that Pegasus, were he to exist, would belong among the causally active/passive. What prevents him from being such is his nonexistence. His existence, therefore, cannot be explicated in terms of causal activity/passivity.
There is a tendency to conflate two different questions about existence. One question about existence concerns what exists. Answers to this question can be supplied in the form of definitions like (D) above. But there is a deeper question about existence, namely, the question as what it is for an existing thing to exist. What I have just argued is that this second question cannot be answered with any definition like (D). For even if you find a definition that is extensionally correct and immune to counterexamples, you will at the very most have specified the necessary and sufficient conditions for a thing's being among existing things. You will have not thereby have put your finger on what it is for an existing item to exist.
Suppose you say that, for any x, x exists =df x has properties. This proposal has an excellent chance of being extensionally correct: necessarily, everything that exists has properties, and everything that has properties exists. But the proposal does not get at the existence of an existing thing precisely because it presupposes the existence of existing things. This is because all such definitions are really circular inasmuch as they have the form:
For any x, x exists =df x is ____ and x exists.
Existence itself eludes definitional grasp. Even if the existent can be defined, the Existence of the existent cannot be defined. For more on this fascinating topic, see my A Paradigm Theory of Existence (Kluwer 2002), pp. 2-8.
Rorty on the Idea of a Liberal Society: Anything Goes
Rorty is dead, but a thinker lives on in his recorded thoughts, and we honor a thinker by thinking his thoughts with a mind that is at once both open and critical, open but not empty or passive. In Chapter Three of Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Richard Rorty writes:
It is central to the idea of a liberal society that, in respect to words as opposed to deeds, persuasion as opposed to force, anything goes. This openmindedness should not be fostered because Scripture teaches, Truth is great and will prevail, nor because, as Milton suggests, Truth will always win in a free and open encounter. It should be fostered for its own sake. A liberal society is one which is content to call 'true' whatever the upshot of such encounters turns out to be. That is why a liberal society is badly served by an attempt to supply it with 'philosophical foundations.' For the attempt to supply such foundations presupposes a natural order of topics and arguments which is prior to, and overrides the results of, encounters between old and new vocabularies. (pp. 51-52, italics in original, bolding added.)
Continue reading “Rorty on the Idea of a Liberal Society: Anything Goes”
Van Jones Is Out!
And good riddance to him. But no thanks to the miserable MSM who have failed to exercise due diligence in ferreting out this weasel. (Nice piece of invective, eh? 'Ferreting out a weasel.' It just occurred to me.) Michelle Malkin covers the story. Follow her links. Ron Radosh, who as a red diaper baby knows a thing or two about commies and their ways, weighs in here.
Advice for Hollywood Liberals
Robert M. Thornton, ed., Cogitations from Albert Jay Nock (Irvington-on-Hudson: The Nockian Society, 1970), p. 59:
If realism means the representation of life as it is actually lived, I do not see why lives which are actually lived on a higher emotional plane are not so eligible for representation as those lived on a lower plane. (Memoirs, 200)
Exactly. If the aim is to depict reality as it is, why select only the most worthless and uninspiring portions of reality for portrayal? Why waste brilliant actors on worthless roles, Paul Newman in The Color of Money, Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner in The War of the Roses, to take two examples off the top of my head from a potential list of thousands. The Grifters is another example. An excellent film in any number of respects. But imagine a film of the same cinematic quality which portrays in a subtle and intelligent manner a way of life — I avoid 'lifestyle' — that has some chance of being worth living. Notice I said "subtle and intelligent." I am not advocating Sunday School moralizing or hokey platitudinizing. And note that I am not opposing the above mentioned, but pointing out that a constant diet of dreck is both boring and unhealthy.
But I don't expect the folks in HollyWeird (Michael Medved's expression) to comprehend the simple point I have just made. They are too mesmerized by the color of money for that. Nor do I expect most liberals to be able to wrap their minds around it. So I'm preaching to the choir and to a few fence-sitters. But that has value: Maybe a fence-sitter or two will slide off to the Right Side; and perhaps the choirboys and girls are in need of a little extra ammo.
A deeper question concerns the purpose of art. To depict reality? That is not obvious. A good topic for someone else to take up. Conservative bloggers, get to it.
A. E. Taylor on F. H. Bradley on Religion
The following quotations are from A. E. Taylor's "F. H. Bradley" which is an account of his relation with the great philosopher, an account published in Mind, vol. XXXIV, no. 133 (January 1925), pp. 1-12. A. E. Taylor is an important philosopher in his own right whose works, unfortunately, are little read nowadays.
Bradley as a Religious Man
I am confident that no one who knew Bradley personally at any time would have supposed him to be anything but what he actually was, an intensely religious man, in the sense of a man whose whole life and thought was permeated by a conviction of the reality of unseen things and a supreme devotion to them.
Bradley on Bibliolatry
In the last conversation I had with him . . . He spoke bitterly of the Christian Church in our country, chiefly on the charge of an alleged 'idolatry' of the text of the Bible, a fault not, I think, really common among Anglicans at the present. He commended the Roman Church for its discouragement of promiscuous Bible-reading, but held that it did not go far enough. He would have the Church, he said, cease to appeal to any literature from the past and insist directly upon its own inherent authority as the living voice of the divine Spirit.
Bradley on Purgatory
Possibly some of my readers who know Bradley only from his books may be surprised at a remark called from him by a passing reference in the same conversation to Purgatory. "But what do you mean by Purgatory? Does it mean that when I die I shall go somewhere where I shall be made better by discipline? If so, that is what I very much hope." In another mood, no doubt, he might have dwelt on the intellectual difficulties in the way of such a hope, but it was characteristic, or at least I thought so, that he evidently clung to it.
Bradley a Mystic
Bradley's own personal religion was of a strongly marked mystical type, in fact of the specific type common to the Christian mystics. Religion meant to him, as to Plotinus or to Newman, direct personal contact with the Supreme and Ineffable, unmediated through any forms of ceremonial prayer, or ritual, and like all mystics in whom this passion for direct access to God is not moderated by the the habit of organised communal worship, he was inclined to set little store on the historical and institutional element in the great religions.
Bradley on the Incarnation
Thus while the conception of the meeting of the divine and the human in one 'by unity of person' lay at the very heart of his philosophy, he was wholly indifferent to the question whether the ideal of the God-Man has or has not been actually realised in flesh and blood in a definite historical person. Like Hegel, he thought it the significant thing about Christianity that it had believed in the incarnation of God in a definite person, but also, like Hegel, he seemed to think it a matter of small importance that the person in which the 'hypostatic union' was believed to have been accomplished should be Jesus the Nazarene rather than any other, and again whether or not the belief was strictly true to fact. The important thing, to his mind, was that the belief stimulates to the attempt to the achievement of 'deiformity' in our own personality.