Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Aporetics

  • The Existential versus the Merely Theoretical: Some Responses to a Reader

    A young Brazilian reader, Vini, refers to an article of mine, Retorsion Revisited: How Far Does it Reach and What Does it Prove? and asks me some questions about it. He is clearly one of those whose interest in philosophy is deeply existential and not merely theoretical or academic.  ‘Existential’ has several meanings both inside…

  • The Concept of Standoff in Philosophy

    Substack latest. A second example: 3. God by his very nature as divine is a concrete being who exists of metaphysical necessity. 4. Nothing concrete could exist of metaphysical necessity. By ‘concrete’ I mean causally active/passive. The God in question is not a causally inert abstract object like a number or a set-theoretical set. Clearly,…

  • The Aporetics of Primary Substance

    I am nothing if not self-critical. And so a partial retraction may be in order.  In A Problem for Hylomorphic Dualism in the Philosophy of Mind, I opened with: 1) A primary substance (a substance hereafter) is a concrete individual.  A man, a horse, a tree, a statue are stock examples of substances.  A substance…

  • The Riddle of Evil and the Pyrrhonian ‘Don’t Care’

    Substack latest on the aporetics of evil.   Today I preach upon a text from Karl Jaspers wherein he comments on St. Augustine (Plato and Augustine, ed. Arendt, tr. Mannheim, Harcourt 1962, p. 110): In interminable discussions, men have tried to sharpen and clarify this contradiction: on the one hand, evil is a mere clouding of…

  • Mind-Body Dualism in Aquinas and Descartes: How Do They Differ?

    Thomas Aquinas, following Aristotle, views the soul as the form of the body. Anima forma corporis. Roughly, soul is to body as form is to matter. So to understand the soul-body relation, we must first understand the form-matter relation.  Henry Veatch points out that "Matter and form are not beings so much as they are…

  • The Man in the Mirror and Belief De Se

    The following can happen.  You see yourself but without self-recognition.  You see yourself, but not as yourself.  Suppose you walk into a room which, unbeknownst to you, has a mirror covering the far wall.  You are slightly alarmed to see a wild-haired man with his fly open approaching you.  You are looking at yourself but you…

  • An Exchange Relevant to the Problem of Dirty Hands

    From Robert Bolt's "A Man for All Seasons." William Roper: So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law! Sir Thomas More: Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil? William Roper: Yes, I'd cut down every law in England to do that! Sir Thomas…

  • Back to Kant! The Aporetics of Appearance

    Ed Buckner writes and I respond in blue: 1) The expression “this table” refers to something, i.e. has a referent. BV: Yes. 2) What it refers to is extended in space and persists through time. BV: No doubt. (1) and (2) are 'datanic claims' in my terminology. They simply must be accommodated by any theory…

  • On ‘Materialize’ and Materialism

      It is interesting that 'materialize' is often used in ordinary English as an intransitive verb to mean: come to be real.  "Rain clouds materialized on the horizon." "The Hezbollah counterattack never materialized." A thing or state of affairs is real if and only if it exists independently of (finite) mind. To be real is…

  • War, Torture, and the Aporetics of Moral Rigorism

    Substack latest.

  • Nominalism Presupposes What it Denies

    What makes a pair of shoes a pair and not just two physical artifacts? Nominalist answer: nothing in reality. Our resident nominalist tells us that it is our use of 'a pair' that imports a unity, conventional and linguistic in nature, a unity that does not exist in reality apart from our conventional importation. We…

  • On Potential and Actual Infinity, and a Puzzle

    Consider the natural numbers (0, 1, 2, 3, . . . n, n +1, . . . ).  If these numbers form a set, call it N, then N will of course be actually infinite.  This because a set in the sense of set theory is a single, definite object, a one-over-many, distinct from each…

  • The Problem of Mirror Images

    In an e-mail, a correspondent poses a problem that I will put in my own way.  BV is alone in a room facing a standard, functioning mirror and he is looking at a man, the man in the mirror.  Call that man MM.  So in this situation, BV is looking at MM.  The question is…

  • Trope Troubles: An Exercise in Aporetics

    Elliot C. asked me about tropes. What follows is a re-post from 30 March 2016, slightly emended, which stands up well under current scrutiny.  Perhaps Elliot will find the time to tell me whether he finds it clear and convincing and whether it answers his questions. ………………………….. A reader  has been much exercised of late…

  • The Analysis of Qualia

    London Ed sends the following for our rumination and delectation:        This is not mine (Lycan's). But it is tricky: 1) Bertie is experiencing a green thing. 2) Suppose that there is no physical green thing outside Bertie’s head. But 3) There is no physical green thing inside Bertie’s head either. 4) If it…