Bill Vallicella – Page 786 – Maverick Philosopher

Amateur and Professional

I've been enjoying your blog for some time now, and particularly appreciated your post Philosophy as Hobby, as Career, as Vocation. I recently mused on this topic at my own philosophy blog - http://loveofallwisdom.com/2009/06/neither-career-nor-hobby/ – and you might find my remarks there of some interest. I'm intrigued, though, by your distinction between professionals and amateurs, as distinct from those who get paid and those who don't. I suspect that by your definition I aspire to be a professional philosopher who doesn't get paid; but I'm not sure, because I'm not entirely sure what you mean. Would you care to spell this distinction out further?

Here is what I wrote:

While I'm on this topic, I may as well mention two other distinctions that are often confused. One is the distinction between professionals and amateurs, the other between people who make money from an activity and those who do not. These distinctions 'cut perpendicular' to one another, hence do not coincide. Spinoza was a professional philosopher even though he made no money from it. One can be a professional philosopher without being a paid professor of it, just as one can be an incompetent amateur and still be paid to teach by a college.

A better way to put it would be as follows. 'Professional' and 'amateur' each have two senses. In one sense, a professional X-er is a person who makes a living from X-ing. This sense of 'professional' contrasts with the sense of 'amateur' according to which an amateur is is an X-er who does not make a living from X-ing. As the etymology of the word suggests, an amateur in this first sense is one who does what he does for love and not for money. In a second sense, a professional X-er is a person whose X-ing meets a high standard of performance, while an amateur in the corresponding sense is one whose X-ing fails to meet a high standard of performance. Examples:

A. Tiger Woods is a professional in both senses and an amateur in neither. Kant is an example among the philosophers.

B. Spinoza and Schopenhauer were professionals in the second sense and amateurs in the first sense.

C. Ayn Rand was a professional in the first sense, but a rank amateur in the second.

D. The vast majority of chess players are amateurs in both senses: they neither make a living from chess, nor do they play at a high level.

‘I Don’t Mind Losing’

'I don't mind losing' illustrates the non-identity of sentence meaning and speaker's meaning. Anyone who understands English knows what the sentence in question means. Its meaning is fixed by the rules of the language system, English. But what the sentence means is what very few people mean when they produce a token of the sentence.

A gentleman came to our chess club but once. And this despite our showing him every hospitality. For he lost every game. He had played seriously as a youth but hadn't recently. I explained to him that we are a bunch of patzers and that soon enough he would be winning games. He replied, "I don't mind losing." But he never came back despite a follow-up call or two.

In the mouths of most if not all 'I don't mind losing' means: I mind losing and I mind admitting that I mind losing, which is why I pretend not to mind losing.

ADDENDUM: If you read the above carefully, you will have noticed that I enclosed the sentence under comment with single quotation marks on two occasions but double quotation marks in the middle paragraph. Why? In the middle paragraph I was quoting an actual person, whereas on the two other occasions I was not quoting, strictly speaking, but mentioning a sentence. You may want to take a gander at my post Use and Mention. It's fun for the whole family. And from there you can get to my post On Hairsplitting.

On Profiling

Do all liberals lack common sense? No, but many of them do. If you are a liberal and oppose criminal profiling, then I say you lack common sense.

It is obvious that only certain kinds of people commit certain kinds of crimes. Suppose a rape has occurred at the corner of Fifth and Vermouth. Two males are moving away from the crime scene. One, the slower moving of the two, is a Jewish gentleman, 80 years of age, with a chess set under one arm and a copy of Maimonides' Guide for the Perplexed under the other. The other fellow, a vigorous twenty year old, is running from the scene.

Continue reading “On Profiling”

Consciousness and the Conservation of Energy

This just over the transom:

I've been reading your blog recently and find it to be very good. [. . .] Since you question mortalism, a doctrine I've had some doubts about myself, I thought you might find a use for some ideas of mine on the matter.

Posting on machineslikeus.com, I encountered someone who argued that belief in a 'future state' (Hume's term, not his) was irrational. His illustration was telling:

'We never ask, "Where did the 60 Miles Per Hour go after the car hit the cement pylon?"'
This got my attention because I have suspected for a while that belief in a future state may be like belief in potential energy; no-one can SEE potential energy, but various rational concerns suggest that it completes what we see. Just as we have confidence that potential energy always 'completes' the evident kinetic energy in a closed system, we should also believe that our consciousness, being truly real, cannot be annihilated. Each time I hear mortalism stated, the arguments used seem to agree with my analysis; mortalists often claim that they expect to be annihilated or to 'cease to exist'. Hume himself, I think, is credited with expecting 'annihilation' at death. Doesn't basic physics suggest that this is impossible, however? No-one speaks of this happening to energy, so why should it happen to consciousness?

Here is the relevant part of my response from the site:

'We never ask, "Where did the 60 Miles Per Hour go after the car hit the cement pylon?"'

That's not a very good example. We do, in fact, ask where the '60 Miles Per Hour' went, in the sense of asking questions about the transfer of kinetic energy. As most people know, when a car slows down its kintetic energy is transferred into heat, sound, energy in other bodies and so on. Asking 'where the speed went', or, more accurately, where the energy went, is a legitimate question.

If anything, your example highlights something important by a mistake that erodes your case. When people wonder 'where did the consciousness go?' they are implicitly appealing to the Principle of Conservation in much the same way that a scientist appeals to it when they wonder about energy being transferred. There's nothing immediately stupid about that.

Given this, I think that we face a stark choice about consciousness as follows:

1 Consciousness is real and the Principle of Conservation is universal. Therefore, consciousness is permanent and is always conserved in some form, though not necessarily a visible or obvious form. Just because we cannot see consciousness after death doesn't mean it no longer exists; our trust in the Principle of Conservation should override this.

2 Consciousness is real but the Principle of Conservation is not universal. It only applies to certain things. (Which things, and why?) Therefore, consciousness is not necessarily conserved.

3 Consciousness is not real. It never existed in the first place.

Since my thoughts on the topic are still developing, I'd be interested in your input.

Continue reading “Consciousness and the Conservation of Energy”

Philosophy as Hobby, as Career, as Vocation

An e-mail from a few years back with no name attached:

Leiter fancies himself a gatekeeper to the realm of academic philosophy. You gotta love the professional gossip that seeps through his blog – Ned Block got an offer from Harvard but turned it down, here's the latest coming out of the Eastern APA, or noting, yesterday, that Ted Honderich consulted him during the publication of the new Oxford Companion to Philosophy. And look at the way Leiter prides himself on knowing the goings on at each school and each professor. . . what a status-obsessed elitist (I believe those are your words). No wonder this guy publishes the PGR. Others of us enjoy doing philosophy, most of the time, but here is a man who loves *being* a philosopher, all of the time.

Continue reading “Philosophy as Hobby, as Career, as Vocation”

In Today, Out Tomorrow

If Putnam in a hundred years will be where Lotze is now, why read Putnam rather than Lotze?

If Obituaries Were Objective . . . II

I found the following in this morning's mail bag. From a philosophy professor who enjoyed my If Obituaries Were Objective . . . :

Perhaps a more realistic, and to my mind a more depressing objective obit would read as follows:

Philosophy professor x showed great academic promise from early in his career. He published a revised version of his dissertation to great acclaim. He followed this work by well over one hundred articles and scores of books. His third book was for three weeks on the NYT bestsellers list. Within the discipline, professor x is perhaps best known for his famous counter-example to the such-and-such argument. He was, in short, one of the rare examples of a successful professional philosopher.

On the other hand, professor x was known to have been an insufferably arrogant boor and a notorious seducer of his graduate students. His work was motivated almost exclusively by a desire to improve his reputation and advance his professional career; he was driven by appetite and thumos, rarely if ever by nous; he really had no genuine personal connection to what the great ancient philosophers would have recognized as "philosophy."

In sum, professor x was a successful professional-philosopher, but he was no philosopher.

(Have I just composed the obit of the typical follower of the Leiter Report?)

The Worst Thing About Poverty

Theodor Haecker, Journal in the Night (Pantheon, 1950, tr. Dru), p. 38, written in 1940:

155. The worst of poverty — today at any rate — the most galling and the most difficult thing to bear, is that it makes it almost impossible to be alone. Neither at work, nor at rest, neither abroad nor at home, neither waking nor sleeping, neither in health, nor — what a torture — in sickness.

Money cannot buy happiness but in many circumstances it can buy the absence of misery. Due diligence in its acquisition and preservation is therefore well recommended. The purpose of money is not to enable indulgence but to make possible a life worth living. Otium liberale in poverty is a hard row to hoe; a modicum of the lean green helps immeasurably. Things being as they are, a life worth living for many of us is more a matter of freedom from than freedom for. Money buys freedom from all sorts of negatives. Money allows one to avoid places destroyed by the criminal element and their liberal enablers, to take but one example. And chiming in with Haecker's main point, money buys freedom from oppressive others so that one can enjoy happy solitude, the sole beatitude. (O beata solitudo, sola beatitudo!)

Advice on Publishing From the 17th Century

Suppose you are working on an article that you plan on sending to some good journal with a high rejection rate. You know that what you have written still needs some work, but you submit it anyway in the hope of a conditional acceptance and comments with the help of which you will perfect your piece. This is a mistaken approach. Never submit anything that is not as good as you can make it. And this for a reason supplied long ago by that master observer of the human condition, Baltasar Gracian (1601-1658):

Never show half-finished things to others. Let them be enjoyed in their perfection. All beginnings are formless, and what lingers is the image of that deformity. The memory of having seen something imperfect spoils out enjoyment when it is finished. To take in a large object at a single glance keeps us from appreciating the parts, but it satisfies our taste. Before it is, everything is not, and when it begins to be, it is still very close to nonbeing. It is revolting to watch even the most succulent dish being cooked. Great teachers are careful not to let their works be seen in embryo. Learn from nature, and don't show them until they look good. (The Art of Worldly Wisdom #231, tr. Christopher Maurer.)

The 1961 JFK Moon Speech

An excerpt from the speech without which, arguably, there would have been no moon landing on this date in 1969.

How pusillanimous and shortsighted are those who balk at space exploration. Have they stopped to consider what ‘satellite TV’ means? Are they aware of how those communication satellites were placed in their geosynchronous orbits? Do they think that money spent on a Mars expedition would be wasted and better spent on terrestrial needs? That’s an illusory way of thinking.

Had all the time and money spent on pure research and exploration over the centuries been spent on alleviating immediate needs we would have none of the technological wherewithal with which we most marvelously and most efficiently — alleviate our immediate needs.

Whence ‘Bosh’?

'Bosh,' meaning nonsense, derives from the Turkish 'boş,' which counts among its meanings: empty, hollow, vacant, futile, unfounded, ignorant and several others. I have known this Turkish word for over ten years, but didn't note the connection between 'boş' and 'bosh' until I happened across the entry for the latter in Robert Hendrickson, QPB Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins, 2nd ed., p. 96. According to Hendrickson, "The novelist James Morier introduced the word in a book about Turkish life published in 1834."

'Coffee,' 'kiosk,' and 'divan' are also on loan from Turkish corresponding as they do to kahve, köşk, and divan.

As interesting as facts like these are to me, it is more interesting that there are people who have no interest in them.

Whither and Whence

I had a teacher in the fifth grade who, when one of us inappropriately wandered off, would query, "Whither goest thou?" alluding, as I did not realize at the time, to the Gospel of John (13:36):

Simon Peter said unto him, Lord, whither goest thou? Jesus answered him, Whither I go, thou canst not follow me now; but thou shalt follow me afterwards.

'Whither' means to where just as 'whence' mean from where. (Please avoid the pleonasm of 'from whence.') The distinction is obliterated by the promiscuous use of 'where' for both. That cannot be good from a logical point of view. It is therefore right and fitting and conducive unto clarity that my favorite antediluvian curmudgeon, the Laudator Temporis Acti, should complain:

The use of whither is withering away in English, alas, just like whence, although both words usefully distinguish notions that we now force where alone to bear, e.g. in the New International Version of John 13.36:

Simon Peter asked him, "Lord, where are you going?" Jesus replied, "Where I am going, you cannot follow now, but you will follow later."

Jim Fixx Remembered

It was 25 years ago today, during a training run. Running pioneer James F. Fixx, author of the wildly successful The Complete Book of Running, keeled over dead of cardiac arrest. He died with his 'boots' on, and not from running but from a bad heart. It's a good bet that his running added years to his life in addition to adding life to his years. I've just pulled my hardbound copy of The Complete Book of Running from the shelf. It's a first edition, 1977, in good condition with dust jacket. I read it when it first came out. Do I hear $1000? Just kidding, it's not for sale. This book and the books of that other pioneer, George Sheehan, certainly made a difference in my life.

The atavism and simplicity and cleansing quality of a good hard run are particularly beneficial for Luftmenschen. Paradoxically, the animality of it releases lofty thoughts.

See here for a comparison of Fixx and Sartre. And here for something on George Sheehan.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Peter and Gordon

The Grim Reaper, the ultimate Repo Man, is certainly no slacker. In recent days he has paid a visit to Karl Malden, Ed McMahon, Farah Fawcett, Michael Jackson, Billy Mays (America's Pitchman), Walter Cronkite, and today I heard of the passing of Gordon Waller, 64, of Peter and Gordon fame. P & G were major players in the 1964 'British Invasion.' Here is a hit to remember Gordon by. From 1965.

And here's another. And another.

Death is near my friends, right around the corner. It doesn't take much to send you packing into Kingdom Come: a little food gone down the wrong way, a texting moron of a motorist, a bit of errant plaque lodged in a cerebral artery. . . . So work out your salvation with diligence while the sun shines. You're burning daylight while hanging by a thread.

Kerouac 5K

Jack Kerouac's "Springtime Mary" was Mary Carney, described in the novel Maggie Cassidy and depicted on the left; mine was a lass name of Mary Korzen from Chicago. She didn't get me into running, my old friend Marty Boren did; but she lent my impecunious and sartorially challenged self her shorts in which I stumbled in my heavy high-topped boots around the Chestnut Hill reservoir on my first run in the summer of '74. 35 years a runner, but going on 41 years a Kerouac aficionado: I read and endlessly re-read On the Road as a first semester college freshman. (And a week ago I found a copy of the original scroll version of OTR which came out in 2007 (1957 + 50) in a used bookstore; completist and fanatic that I am, I of course purchased it.) Running and Kerouac being two constants of my life, I was happily surprised to hear from a local runner that Lowell, Mass. hosts an annual Kerouac 5 kilometer road race. Kerouac was a track and football star in high school, winning scholarships to Boston College and Columbia. Had he chosen BC he would not have met Ginsberg and Burroughs the other two of the Beat triumvirate, and I wouldn't be writing this post.

Appropriately enough, given Kerouac's prodigious boozing which finally did him in at the tender age of 47 in 1969, the race starts from Hookslide Kelly's a Lowell sportsbar. Here is a shot from Kerouac's football days, and a photo of one of the covers of Maggie Cassidy: