Author: Bill Vallicella

A Protreptic Puzzler

A curious passage from Aristotle's Protrepticus:

. . . the fact that all men feel at ease in philosophy, wishing to dedicate their whole lives to the pursuit of it by leaving behind all other concerns, is in itself weighty evidence that it is a painless pleasure to dedicate oneself wholeheartedly to philosophy. For no one is willing to engage in exhausting work for a long time. (#53, p. 24)

To set the Stagirite straight, I should like to shunt his shade into some Philosophy 101 classroom for a spell.

A Reason to Blog

Chary of embalming in printer’s ink ideas that may be unworthy of such preservation, due perhaps to underdevelopment, or lack of originality, or some more egregious defect, the blogger satisfies his urge to scribble and publish without burdening referees and editors and typesetters, and without contributing to the devastation of forests. He publishes all right, but in a manner midway between the ephemerality of talk and the finality of print.

Is Bradley’s Regress Already in Aristotle?

At Metaphysics Zeta (Book VII, Chapter 17, Bekker 1041b10-30), there is a clear anticipation of Bradley’s Regress and an interesting formulation of what may well count as the fundamental problem of metaphysics, the problem of unity. What follows is the W. D. Ross translation of the passage. It is a mess presumably because the underlying Greek text is a mess. The Montgomery Furth and Richard Hope translations are not much better. But the meaning is to me quite clear, and I will explain it after I cite the passage:

Continue reading “Is Bradley’s Regress Already in Aristotle?”

Francesco Orilia on Facts and Bradley’s Regress Part II

In Part I of this series I provided a preliminary description of the problem that exercises Orilia and me and a partial list of assumptions we share. One of these assumptions is that there are truth-making facts. We also both appreciate that Bradley’s Regress (‘the Regress’) threatens the existence of facts. Why should this be so? Well, the existence of a fact is the unity of its constitutents: when they are unified in the peculiar fact-constituting manner, then the fact exists. But this unity needs an explanation, which cannot be empirical-causal, but must be ontological. The existence of facts cannot be taken as a brute ontological fact. But when we cast about for an explanation, we bang into the Regress. Let me now try to clarify this a bit further. We distinguish between an internal Regress and an external Regress, and in both cases we must investigate whether it is vicious or benign.

Continue reading “Francesco Orilia on Facts and Bradley’s Regress Part II”

Acting With Others Versus Talking With Others

An excellent insight from Alain’s essay, “The Ills of Others”:

To act with others is always good; to talk with others for the sake of talking, complaining, and recriminating, is one of the greatest scourges on earth . . . . (Alain on Happiness, Frederick Ungar 1973, p. 160)

I once built a small dock with another man. We had little or nothing in common intellectually or spiritually. You could say we lived on different planets. Conversation with him about any matter beyond the sensibly present was pointless or worse. But with tools in hand, confronting the recalcitrance of matter, with a definite physical end in view, engaged in a common project, his words found guidance and anchorage, and our words together served a purpose. Acting together we achieved something. The job done, the handiwork admired, I found myself actually liking the guy. But had we been just talking, I would have found it a moral challenge not to be disgusted with him. Few possess the mental equipment and discipline to engage in fruitful conversation that is not anchored in the mundane.

Again I note, as in an earlier Alain post, the French love of the universal quantifier: “To act with others is always good. . . .” Obviously, acting with others is not always good. for reasons you an easily supply yourself. So why the exaggeration? For literary effect.

Please don’t accuse me of committing a hasty generalization. I am not inferring some such proposition as ‘French writers misuse universal quantifiers for literary effect’ from this one instance, or this instance plus the one cited in the earlier post; what I am doing is illustrating an antecedently established general proposition. This is a distinction one should observe, but is too often not observed, namely, the distinction between generalizing and illustrating. Someone who illustrates a general claim by providing an example is not inferring the general claim from the example.

Why I am Such a Hot Ticket on the Party Circuit

Thomas Cathcart and Daniel Klein, Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar . . . Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes, Abrams Image 2007, pp. 183-184:

Contemporary philosopher William Vallicella writes, “Metaphilosophy is the philosophy of philosophy. It is itself a branch of philosophy, unlike the philosophy of science, which is not a branch of science, or the philosophy of religion, which is not a branch of religion.”

It is statements like this that have made Vallicella such a hot ticket on the party circuit.

I haven’t read the book, so I can’t tell you what I think of it. The only reason I know about the above citation is because Dymphna of Gates of Vienna drew it to my attention.

Amiel on Duty

“Duty has the virtue of making us feel the reality of a positive world while at the same time detaching us from it.” (See here.)

This is a penetrating observation, and a nearly perfect specimen of the aphorist’s art. It is terse, true, but not trite. The tip of an iceberg of thought, it invites exfoliation.

If the world were literally a dream, there would be no need to act in it or take it seriously. One could treat it as one who dreams lucidly can treat a dream: one lies back and enjoys the show in the knowledge that it is only a dream. But to the extent that I feel duty-bound to do this or refrain from that, I take the world to be real, to be more than maya or illusion. Feeling duty-bound, I realize the world.

And to the extent that I feel duty-bound to do something, to make real what merely ought to be, I am referred to this positive world as to the locus of realization.

But just how real is the world of our ordinary waking experience? Is it the ne plus ultra of reality? Its manifest deficiency gives the lie to this supposition, which is why great philosophers from Plato to Bradley have denied ultimate reality to the sense world. Things are not the way they ought to be, and things are the way they ought not be, and everyone with moral sense feels this to be true. The Real falls short of the Ideal, and, falling short demonstrates its lack of plenary reality. So while the perception of duty realizes the world, it also and by the same stroke de-realizes it by measuring it against a standard from elsewhere.

The sense of duty detaches us from the world of what is by referring us to what ought to be. What ought to be, however, in many cases is not; hence we are referred back to the world of what is as the scene wherein alone ideals can be realized.

It is a curious dialectic. The Real falls short of the Ideal and is what is is in virtue of this falling short. The Ideal, however, is not but only ought to be. It lacks reality just as the Real lacks ideality. Each is what it is by not being what it is not. And we moral agents are caught in this interplay. We are citizens of two worlds and must play the ambassador between them.

Existence as a Property: A Response to David Brightly

David Brightly commented: “Why bother with existence as a property since everything has it and it does not help distinguish individuals? Is there an argument that convinces you that existence is a property, or is this in some way a matter of ‘philosophical taste’?”

1. Existence can be a property without being a property of individuals. It might be a property of properties or concepts or propositional functions or Tichian offices or some cognate item. But our concern is whether, and in what sense, existence is a property of individuals.

2. If existence is a property of individuals, then one can ask whether it classifies individuals into two groups, the existent and the nonexistent. If existence is classificatory in this way, then the individuals it classifies cannot, in themselves, be existent: they must be nonexistent individuals. But I mention this (Meinongian) theory only to set it aside for the space of this post. I maintain that there are no nonexistent individuals, that all individuals exist. This is not self-evident. Nor is it a logical truth that every individual exists. If it were, then it would be a formal-logical contradiction to say that some individuals do not exist, but it is not. For more on this topic, and a critique of van Inwagen, see here.

Continue reading “Existence as a Property: A Response to David Brightly”

Alain on Keeping to the Present

Alain
Emile-Auguste Chartier (1868-1951) was a French professor of philosophy among whose students were Raymond Aron and Simone Weil. Chartier’s sunny disposition, however, did not rub off on the brooding Weil. Under the pseudonym ‘Alain,’ Chartier published thousands of two-page essays in newspapers. Were he alive and active today he would most likely be a philosoblogger.

Speaking of the Stoics, Alain writes,

One of their arguments which I have always found good, and which has been useful to me more than once, is their concept of the past and the future. “We have only the present to bear,” they said. “Neither the past not the future can harm us, since the one no longer exists and the other does not yet exist.”

[. . .]

. . . keep your mind on the present; keep your mind on your life, which moves onward from minute to minute; one minute follows another; it is therefore possible to live as you are living, since you are alive. But the future terrifies me, you say. That is something you know nothing about. What happens is never what we expected; and as for your present suffering, you may be sure that it will diminish precisely because it is so intense. Everything changes, everything passes away. This maxim has often saddened us; the very least it can do is console us once in a while. (Alain on Happiness, Frederick Ungar 1973, trs. R. D. and J. E. Cottrell, pp. 144-145)

The literary merit of Alain’s writing is in evidence in the concluding sentence. My only quibble is with the typically Gallic exaggeration: what happens is never what we expected? Ah, the French love of the the universal quantifier!

Companion post: Can You Get Through the Next Hour?

The Glutton and the Lecher

The glutton’s belly betrays his vice: the bigger the belly, the more entrenched the vice. It is a good thing for the lecher that there is no similar correlation between the depth of his vice and the size of the offending organ. A good thing for his body, if not for his soul.

The Direction of This Weblog

This from a reader:

I have been following your blog for some time, from the move to PowerBlogs to the recent move to TypePad. I have two questions I’d like to ask:

First, are you going to post your opinions on the election? I have particularly enjoyed reading the reactions of several conservatives . . . . As such, I would love to hear your own thoughts on the issues.

Second, why have you never taken Brian Leiter to task? His utter distaste for anything conservative; his mockery of anyone who votes Republican as “war mongers,” religious fanatics, etc.; his politicizing of philosophy, and his obsession for status, fame, and power; all these appear to run directly counter to everything you stand for and believe in. [. . .]

This e-mail gives me an opportunity to comment on the direction of this blog.

1. I am by nature apolitical. The political sphere impresses me as a realm of mendacity and illusion and a distraction from what truly matters, namely, one’s self-actualization. At the moment this impression is very much in the ascendancy. This explains why I haven’t posted anything about the election. Thus I expect this incarnation of Maverick Philosopher to contain less material on currect political events. But one cannot ignore this stuff since one’s ability to live in freedom is put in jeopardy by government. So I will continue to keep an eye on developments and will speak out when sufficiently moved to do so.

2. I will however disallow comments on all posts except those of a technical philosophical nature. Discussions of politics and religion, and indeed of anything that cannot be precisely and rigorously articulated, are often a waste of time, and almost always a waste of time when there is insufficient common ground between the interlocutors.

3. My reader asks why I have never taken Brian Leiter to task. My reader and I seem to share the view that Leiter is a contemptible fellow, a status-obsessed careerist, and a living example of how corrupt academic philosophy can become. To pay any attention to him or his ravings would be a waste of time. I’ve done my bit to counter the ideas of the Left, and it is ideas, not persons, that count in the end.

Can You Get Through the Next Hour?

The present can always be borne – if sliced thinly enough – and it is only the present that must be borne.

This aphorism of mine is in the Stoic spirit. It illustrates the Stoic method of division. Any process or procedure or undertaking which seems overwhelming or unbearable when surveyed as a whole can be managed if one breaks it down into its parts. Since it is not all at once, it needn’t be managed and borne all at once. One does not run the marathon all at once, but stride by stride. The wise marathoner at the starting line does not remind himself that he must run the daunting distance of 26.2 miles, he just starts running. Near the end, when he is spent, he thinks only of the next step. One can always take another step, and only one step needs to be taken at each time.

Here is Pierre Hadot (The Inner Citadel, p. 133) quoting from the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius (XI, 3):

A seductive melody . . . you can despise it if you divide it into each of its sounds, and if you ask yourself if you are lesser than each one of them taken separately; if you are you would be filled with shame. The same thing will happen if you repeat this procedure in each figure . . . In general, then, and with the exception of virtue and its effects, remember to head as quickly as you can for the parts of a process, in order, by dividing them, to get to the point where you have contempt for them. Transpose this method, moreover, to life in its entirety.

Analysis destroys the seductiveness but also the fearfulness of processual wholes by decomposing them into temporal parts that can be easily negotiated. How will I get through this life of trial and tribulation? How will I bear up under sickness, old age, and dying? I will do it day by day, hour by hour. One can always get throught the next hour, minute, second. As Hadot puts it, “No object can make us lose our mastery over ourselves if we submit it to this method of division.” (133)

There is a comparison worth exploring between the soteriological use to which Stoics put analysis and the use to which Buddhists put it, as in Milinda’s Chariot. But that is a large topic for later.