Author: Bill Vallicella

Which Is More Certain: God or My Hand?

A reader inquires, " I'm curious, if someone asked you what you were more certain of, your hand or belief in the existence of God, how would you respond?"

The first thing a philosopher does when asked a question is examine the question.  (Would that ordinary folk, including TV pundits, would do likewise before launching into gaseous answers to ill-formed questions.)  Now what exactly am I being asked?  The question seems ambiguous as between:

Q1. Are you more certain of the existence of your hand or of the existence of God?

Q2. Are you more certain of the existence of your hand or of your belief in the existence of God? 

Continue reading “Which Is More Certain: God or My Hand?”

Rod Serling Rules: Twilight Time Again

Serling The semi-annual Twilight Zone marathon is under way at the Sci Fi channel and will continue through New Year's Day and into the wee hours of January 2nd. Here is your chance to view some of the episodes you may have missed.  The best of them are phenomenally good and bristling with philosophical content. I have just given you my analysis of "The Lonely" which aired in November, 1959.  I just now viewed the The Dummy for the nth time, and I note that the ascriptivist theory of personhood I mentioned in my analysis of "The Lonely" also figures in "The Dummy."

The original series ran from 1959 to 1964. In those days it was not uncommon to hear TV condemned as a vast wasteland. Rod Serling's work was a sterling counterexample.

The hard-driving Serling lived a short but intense life. Born in 1924, he was dead at age 50 in 1975. His four pack a day cigarette habit destroyed his heart. Imagine smoking 80 Lucky Strikes a day! Assuming 16 hours of smoking time per day, that averages to one cigarette every twelve minutes.  He died on the operating table during an attempted bypass procedure.

But who is to say that a long, healthy life is better than a short, intense one fueled by the stimulants one enjoys? That is a question for the individual, not Hillary, to decide.

Philosophy From the Twilight Zone: “The Lonely”

Alicia and corry Rod Serling's Twilight Zone was an outstanding TV series that ran from 1959-1964. The episode "The Lonely" aired in November, 1959. I have seen it several times, thanks to the semi-annual Sci Fi channel TZ marathons. There is one in progress as I write.  One can extract quite a bit of philosophical juice from "The Lonely" as from most of the other TZ episodes. I'll begin with a synopsis.

Synopsis.James A. Corry is serving a 50 year term of solitary confinement on an asteroid nine million miles from earth. Supplies are flown in every three months. Captain Allenby, unlike the other two of the supply ship's crew members, feels pity for Corry, and on one of his supply runs brings him a female robot named 'Alicia' to alleviate his terrible loneliness. The robot is to all outer appearances a human female. At first, Corry rejects her as a mere robot, a machine, and thus "a lie." He feels he is being mocked. "Why didn't they build you to look like a machine?" But gradually Corry comes to ascribe personhood to Alicia. His loneliness vanishes. They play chess with a set he has constructed out of nuts and bolts. She takes delight in a Knight move, and Corry shares her delight. They beam at each other.

Continue reading “Philosophy From the Twilight Zone: “The Lonely””

The End of Moderation

Haecker Theodor Haecker, Journal in the Night (Pantheon, 1950, tr. Dru), p. 29:

Many a man thinks to satisfy the great virtue of moderation by using all his shrewdness and bringing all his experience to bear upon limiting his pleasure to his capacity for pleasure. But simply by the fact of setting enjoyment as the end, he has radically violated the virtue.

A penetrating observation.  What is the end or goal of moderation? Haecker is rejecting the notion that the purpose of moderation, conceived as a virtue, is to maximize the intensity and duration of pleasure. Of course, moderation can be used for that end — but then it ceases to be a virtue. For example, if I am immoderate in my use of alcohol and drugs, I will destroy my body, and with it my capacity for pleasure. So I must limit my pleasure to my capacity for pleasure. And the same holds for immoderation in eating and sexual indulgence. The sex monkey can kill you if you let him run loose. And even if one's immoderation does not lead to an early death, it can eventuate in a jadedness at odds with enjoyment. So moderation can be recommended merely on hedonistic grounds. The true hedonist must of necessity be a man of moderation. If so, then the ill-starred John Belushi, who took the 'speedball' (heroin + cocaine) express to Kingdom Come, did not even succeed at being a very good hedonist.

But if enjoyment is the end of moderation, then moderation as a virtue is at an end. Haecker, however, does not tell us what the end of moderation as a virtue is. He would presumably not disagree with the claim that the goal of moderation as a virtue is a freedom from pleasure and pain that allows one to pursue higher goods. He who is enslaved to his lusts his simply not free to pursue a truer and higher life.

For the New Year: Looking Away Shall Be My Only Negation

Nietzsche

One of the elements in my personal liturgy is a reading of the following passage every January 1st. I must have begun the practice in the mid-70s. My copy of The Gay Science was purchased in Boston and is dated 15 September 1974. (You mean to tell me that when you buy books, you do not note where you bought them, and when, and in whose presence?)

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Book Four, #276, tr. Kaufmann:

For the new year. — I still live, I still think: I still have to live, for I still have to think. Sum, ergo cogito: cogito, ergo sum. Today everybody permits himself the expression of his wish and his dearest thought: hence I, too, shall say what it is that I wish from myself today, and what was the first thought to run across my heart this year — what thought shall be for me the reason, warranty, and sweetness of my life henceforth. I want to learn to see more and more as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who makes things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation. And all and all and on the whole: someday I wish to be only a Yes-sayer.

(Amor fati: love of fate.)

On the Elusive Notion of a Set: Sets as Products of Collectings

In an important article, Max Black writes:

Beginners are taught that a set having three members is a single thing, wholly constituted by its members but distinct from them. After this, the theological doctrine of the Trinity as "three in one" should be child's play. ("The Elusiveness of Sets," Review of Metaphysics, June 1971, p. 615)

1. A set in the mathematical (as opposed to commonsense) sense is a single item 'over and above' its members. If the six shoes in my closet form a mathematical set, and it is not obvious that they do, then that set is a one-over-many: it is one single item despite its having six distinct members each of which is distinct from the set, and all of which, taken collectively, are distinct from the set.   A set with two or more members is not identical to one of its members, or to each of its members, or to its members taken together, and so the set  is distinct from its members taken together, though not wholly distinct from them: it is after all composed of them and its very identity and existence depends on them.

In the above quotation, Black is suggesting that mathematical sets are contradictory entities: they are both one and many.  A set is one in that it is a single item 'over and above' its members or elements as I have just explained.  It is many in that it is "wholly constituted" by its members. (We leave out of consideration the null set and singleton sets which present problems of their own.)  The sense in which sets are "wholly constituted" by their members can be explained in terms of the Axiom of Extensionality: two sets are numerically the same iff they have the same members and numerically different otherwise. Obviously, nothing can be both one and many at the same time and in the same respect.  So it seems there is a genuine puzzle here.  How remove it?

Continue reading “On the Elusive Notion of a Set: Sets as Products of Collectings”

Non-Empty Thoughts About the Empty Set

1. The empty or null set is a strange animal. It is a set, but it has no members. This is of course not a contingent fact about it, but one bound up with its very identity: the null set is essentially null. Intuitively, however, one might have thought that a set is a group of two or more things. Indeed, Georg Cantor famously defines a set (Menge) as "any collection into a whole (Zusammenfassung zu einem Ganzen) of definite and separate objects of our intuition and thought." (Contributions to the Founding of the Theory of Transfinite Numbers, Dover 1955, p. 85) In the case of the null set, however, there are no definite objects that it collects. So in what sense is the null set a set? One might ask a similar question about singletons, sets having exactly one member. But I leave this for later.

Continue reading “Non-Empty Thoughts About the Empty Set”

Aquinas on Intellect’s Independence of Matter: Summa Contra Gentiles, II, 49, 8

In an earlier post on hylomorphic dualism, I said that

Aquinas cannot do justice to his own insight into the independence of the intellect from matter from within the hylomorphic scheme of ontological analysis he inherits from Aristotle. His metaphysica generalis is at war with his special-metaphysical insight into the independence of intellect from matter.

To help nail down half of this assertion, the half that credits the Common Doctor with insight, let's look at one of the arguments Aquinas gives for the intellect's independence of matter, the one at Summa Contra Gentiles, Book II, Chapter 49, Paragraph 8:

Continue reading “Aquinas on Intellect’s Independence of Matter: Summa Contra Gentiles, II, 49, 8″

Paul Churchland on Eliminative Materialism

The most obvious objection to eliminative materialism (EM) is that it denies obvious data, the very data without which there would be no philosophy of mind in the first place. Introspection directly reveals the existence of pains, beliefs, desires, anxieties, pleasures, and the like. Suppose I have a headache. The pain, qua felt, cannot be doubted or denied. Its esse is its percipi. To identify the pain with a brain state makes a modicum of sense; but it makes no sense at all to deny the existence of the very datum that got us discussing this topic in the first place. But Paul M. Churchland (Matter and Consciousness, rev. ed. MIT Press, 1988, pp. 47-48) has a response to this sort of objection:

Continue reading “Paul Churchland on Eliminative Materialism”

Seneca on Drinking

In this festive season it is perhaps appropriate that we should relax a little the bonds that tether us to the straight and narrow.  A fitting apologia for a bit of indulgence and even overindulgence  is found in Seneca, On Tranquility of Mind, XVII, 8-9, tr. Basore:

At times we ought to reach even the point of intoxication, not drowning ourselves in drink, yet succumbing to it; for it washes away troubles, and stirs the mind from its very depths and heals its sorrow just as it does certain ills of the body; and the inventor of wine is not called the Releaser [Liber, Bacchus] on account of the license it gives to the tongue, but because it frees the mind from bondage to cares and emancipates it and gives it new life and makes it bolder in all that it attempts. But, as in freedom, so in wine there is a wholesome moderation.

Sed ut libertatis ita vini salubris moderatio est.

. . .

Yet we ought not to do this often, for fear that the mind may contract an evil habit; nevertheless there are times when it must be drawn into rejoicing and freedom, and gloomy sobriety must be banished for a while.

The Manhattan Shot

Time was when I imbibed two ounces of alcohol per day. But abstemiousness has set in, and now I save the sauce for special occasions. But a favorite delivery form remains what I call the Manhattan shot.

Slam a respectably sized shot glass onto the counter. Fill it two thirds to three quarters with your bourbon of choice. Top it off with sweet vermouth, and finish it with two or three drops of Angosturo(anguish) bitters. Now, without engaging in any such tomfoolery as mixing, knock it back in one fluid gesture. Straight: no chaser, no cherry.

Repeat as necessary.

Eliminative Materialism Defined

A reader inquired about eliminative materialism. In this post I will explain what eliminative materialism is. In later posts, I will indicate why I consider it to be not only false, but irremediably incoherent.

Continue reading “Eliminative Materialism Defined”

Envy, Jealousy, Schadenfreude

The older I get, the more two things impress me. One is the suggestibility of human beings, their tendency to imbibe and repeat ideas and attitudes from their social environment with nary an attempt at critical examination. The other is the major role envy plays in human affairs. Suggestibility is best left for another occasion as part of an analysis of political correctness.

Continue reading “Envy, Jealousy, Schadenfreude“

Schadenfreude with a Twist

To feel envy is to feel diminished by another's success or well-being. Schadenfreude is in a certain sense the opposite: it is to take pleasure or satisfaction in another's misfortune. An interesting case of Schadenfreude is pleasure in having incited envy in another.

Envy is a vice of propinquity. Envy erupts only among people who compare themselves with one another, and for comparison there must be propinquity or social proximity whether it be that of friends, relatives, neighbors, co-workers. Suppose A and B work in the same office, and A gets a promotion. That is a situation in which envy may arise. Suppose it does: B comes to feel diminished by A's success. Even though the change in B is 'merely Cambridge,' as the philosophers say, merely relational, and thus no real change at all, the real change occurring in A, B nonetheless and quite perversely feels bad that A has done well even though B's feeling bad does nothing to improve his lot, and indeed harms him by befouling his mind and predisposing him to acts worse than envy.