Category: Aporetics

On Ceasing to Exist: An Aporetic Tetrad

John F. Kennedy ceased to exist in November of 1963.  (Assume no immortality of the soul.) But when a thing ceases to exist, it does not cease to be an object of reference or a subject of predicates. If this were not the case, then it would not be true to say of JFK that he is dead. But it is true, and indeed true now, that JFK is dead.  Equivalently, 'dead' is now true of JFK.  But this is puzzling: How can a predicate be true of a thing if the thing does not exist?  After a thing ceases to exist it is no longer around to support any predicates. What no longer exists, does not still exist: it does not exist.

I am of the metaphilosophical opinion  that the canonical form of a philosophical problem is the aporetic polyad. Here is our puzzle rigorously set forth as an aporetic tetrad:

1) Datum: There are  predicates that are true of things that no longer exist, e.g., 'dead' and 'famous' and 'fondly remembered' are true of JFK.

2) Veritas sequitur esse: If a predicate is true of an item x, then x exists.

3) Presentism: For any x, x exists iff x is temporally present.

4) The Dead: For any x, if x is dead, then x is temporally non-present.

The limbs of the tetrad are individually plausible but collectively inconsistent.  To solve the tetrad, then, we must reject one of the propositions. It can't be (1) since (1) is a datum. And it can't be (4) since it, on the mortalist assumption, is obviously true. (To avoid the mortalist assumption, change the example to an inanimate object.) Of course, if an animal dies, its corpse typically remains present for a time; but an animal and its corpse are not the same. An animal can die; a corpse cannot die because a corpse was never alive.

One cannot plausibly reject (2) either. To reject (2) is to maintain that a predicate can be true of a thing whether or not the thing exists. This is highly counter-intuitive, to put it mildly.  Suppose it is true that Peter smokes.  Then 'smokes' is true of Peter.  It follows that Peter exists.  It seems we should say the same about Kennedy. It is true that Kennedy is dead. So 'dead' is true of Kennedy, whence it follows that Kennedy exists. Of course, he does not exist at present. But if he didn't exist at all, then it could not be true that Kennedy is dead, famous, veridically remembered, and so on.  Kennedy must in some sense exist if he is to be the object of successful reference and the subject of true predications.

There remains the Anti-Presentist Solution.  Deny (3) by maintaining that it is not only present items that exist. One way of doing this by embracing so-called eternalism, the view that past, present, and future items all exist tenselessly.

But what is it for a temporal item, an item in time, to exist tenselessly?  The number 7 and the proposition 7 is prime exist 'outside of time.'  They exist timelessly.  If the number and the proposition are indeed timeless or atemporal items, then it it makes clear sense to say that 7 tenselessly exists and that 7 is prime both tenseless exists and is tenselessly true.  But it is not clear what it could mean to say that an item in time such as JFK exists tenselessly or is tenselessly dead or famous, etc.

The tenseless existence of a temporal item is not timeless existence. Nor is tenseless existence the same as  omnitemporal/sempiternal existence: Kennedy does not exist at all times.  He existed in time for a short interval of time.  So what is it for a temporal item to exist tenselessly?  Try this:

X exists tenselessly iff X either existed or exists (present tense) or will exist.

But this doesn't help. The disjunction on the right-hand side of the biconditional, with 'Kennedy' substituted for 'X' is true only because the past-tensed 'Kennedy existed' is true. We still have no idea  what it is for a temporal item to exist or have properties tenselessly.  Presumably, 'Kennedy exists tenselessly' says more than what the tensed disjunction says. But what is this more?

Interim Conclusion.  If we can't find a way to make sense of tenseless existence, then we won't be able to reject (3) and we will be stuck with our quartet of inconsistent plausibilities.  More later.

Excluded Middle, Presentism, Truth-Maker: An Aporetic Triad

Suppose we acquiesce in the conflation of Excluded Middle and Bivalence.  The conflation is not unreasonable.  Now try this trio on for size:

Excluded Middle: Every proposition is either true, or if not true, then false.
Presentism: Only what exists at present, exists.
Truth-Maker: Every contingent truth has a truth-maker.

The limbs of the triad are individually plausible but collectively inconsistent. Why inconsistent?

I will die. This future-tensed sentence is true now. It is true that I will die. Is there something existing at present that could serve as truth-maker? Arguably yes, my being mortal. I am now mortal, and my present mortality suffices for the truth of 'I will die.' Something similar holds for my coat. It is true now that it will cease to exist.  While it is inevitable that I will die and that my coat will cease to exist, it is not inevitable that my coat will be burnt up (wholly consumed by fire).  For there are other ways for it to cease to exist, by being cut to pieces, for example, or by just wearing out.

By 'future contingent,' I mean a presently true future-tensed contingent proposition.  The following seems to be a clear example: BV's coat will sometime in the future cease to exist by being wholly consumed in a fire. To save keystrokes: My coat will be burnt up.

By Excluded Middle, either my coat will be burnt up or my coat will not be burnt up. One of these propositions must be true, and whichever one it is, it is true now. Suppose it is true now that my  coat will be burnt up. There  is nothing existing at present that could serve as truth-maker for this contingent truth.  And given Presentism, there is nothing existing at all that could serve as truth-maker.  For on Presentism, only what exists now, exists full stop.  The first two limbs, taken in conjunction, entail the negation of the third, Truth-Maker.  The triad is therefore inconsistent.

So one of the limbs must be rejected. Which one?

An Objection

You say that nothing that now exists could serve as the truth-maker of the presently true future-tensed  contingent proposition BV's coat will be burnt up. I disagree.  If determinism is true, then the present state of the world together with the laws of nature necessitates every later state.   Assuming the truth of the proposition in question, there is a later state of the world in which your shabby coat is burnt up. The truth-maker of the future contingent proposition would then be the present state of the world plus the laws of nature.  So if determinism is true, your triad is consistent, contrary to what you maintain, and we will not be forced to give up one of the very plausible constituent propositions.

Question: Is there a plausible reply to this objection? No. I'll explain why later.

Another Round on (Semantic) Presupposition: An Inconsistent Pentad

Ed writes,

p = *Socrates has just stopped talking*

q  = *Socrates was talking just now*

1. p presupposes q

2. If p presupposes q, then (p or not-p) entails q

3. It is necessary that p or not-p

4. It is necessary that q

5. It is not necessary that Socrates was talking just now

We agree with (1) in some sense. In (2), we try to sharpen that sense, i.e. of ‘presupposition’. (3) is a logical truth. So is (4): if the antecedent is necessary, so is the consequent. (5) is obviously true (unless we hold the necessity of the past, but the example could be changed with the same problematic result).  

My feeling is that we are not being sharp enough about ‘presupposition’. What exactly is it?

……………………………………………..

The above propositions are collectively inconsistent: they cannot all be true.  But there is a philosophical problem only if all of the propositions are plausible. (2), however, is not at all plausible and seems to reflect a blunder on Ed' s part.  The idea behind semantic presupposition is that if p presupposes q, then both p and its negation entail q. What Ed should have written is

       2* If p presupposes q, and p is true, then p entails q, and if p is false, then not-p entails q.

For example, if I stop talking at time t, then my stopping entails my talking immediately before t; if I keep talking at t, then that also entails my talking immediately before t.  The proposition presupposed is the same whether I stop talking or keep talking.

Clearly (2) and (2*) are different propositions. So I solve the pentad by rejecting (2) and its consequences.

If Nothing Exists, is it True that Nothing Exists? Well Yes, but Then . . .

Here is a puzzle for London Ed and anyone else who finds it interesting. It is very simple, an aporetic dyad.

To warm up, note that if snow is white, then it is true that snow is white.  This seems quite unexceptionable, a nice, solid, datanic starting point. It generalizes, of course: for any proposition p, if p, then it is true that p.  Now the connection between antecedent and consequent is so tight that we are loathe to say that it just happens to hold.  It holds of necessity.  So here is the first limb of our aporetic dyad:

a) Necessarily, for any p, if p, then it is true that p.

Equivalently: there is no possible world in which both p and it is not true that p.  For example, there is no possible world in which both 7 + 5 = 12 and it is not true that 7 + 5 = 12.

Intuitively, though, there might have been nothing at all.  Is it not possible that nothing exists? Things exist, of course. But might it not be that everything that exists exists contingently? If so, then there might never have existed anything. Our second limb, then, is this:

b) Possibly, nothing exists.

Equivalently: There is at least one possible world in which nothing exists.

Both limbs of the dyad are plausible, but they can't both be true.  To see this, substitute 'nothing exists' for 'p' in (a) and drop the universal quantifier and the modal operator. This yields:

c) If nothing exists, then it is true that nothing exists.

But (c) can't be true in every world given (b).  For if (c) is true, then something does exist, namely, the truth (true proposition) that nothing exists. But (c) is true in every world given (a).

Therefore (a) and (b) cannot both be true: the dyad is logically inconsistent.

So something has to give, assuming we are not willing to accept that the dyad is an aporia in the strict sense, a conceptual impasse that stops the discursive intellect dead in its tracks.  A-poria: no way.  Do we reject (a) or do we reject (b)? If a solution is possible, then I am inclined to reject (b).

But then I must affirm its negation:

d) Necessarily, something (or other) exists.

(Note that if it is necessary that something exist, it does not follow that some one thing necessarily exists. If there is no possible world in which nothing exists, it does not follow that there is some one thing that exists in every world.)

Yikes! Have I just proven by a priori reasoning the necessary existence of something or other outside the mind?  Of course, I have not proven the necessary existence of God; I may have proven only the necessary existence of those abstract objects called propositions.

(Father Parmenides, with open arms, welcomes home his prodigal son?)

Can One Reasonably Hold that Abortion is Murder but Ought to be Legal?

Victor Reppert poses the following important question on his Facebook page:

What, if anything, is wrong with holding, at the same time that a) Abortion is murder, and b) abortion should be legal?

It's not a logical contradiction, is it? Is it merely counterintuitive? Is it un-Christian?

One way of reaching this position might be to hold that, given a metaphysical or religious perspective, you view abortion as murder, but, living in a society where large segments of the population don't share that perspective, you don't think it reasonable to pass laws imposing that view on the general public.

The propositions in question are not logically contradictory. But one can generate a logical inconsistency by adding an eminently plausible  proposition.  Consider the following antilogism:

a) Abortion is murder
b) Abortion should be legal
c) Murder should be illegal.

The triad is logically inconsistent: the constituent propositions cannot all be true.  

Now (c) is the least rejectable (the least rejection-worthy) of the three propositions. For if the law does not proscribe murder, what would it proscribe? The purpose of the State, at a bare minimum, is to protect life, liberty, and property. (Call it the Lockean triad.) If the State is morally justified, then its passing and enforcing of laws is morally justified. Among these laws are laws pertaining to the killing of human beings. Without going any deeper into it, I will just assert what most of us will accept, namely, that the intentional killing of innocent human being is morally wrong and therefore ought to be made illegal by a morally justified State.

In short, we ought not reject (c). Therefore, one who accepts (a) ought to reject (b). Transforming the antilogism into a syllogism, we get:

Murder should be illegal
Abortion is murder
Ergo
Abortion should be illegal.

Reppert ought to be persuaded by this argument since he accepts the minor and I have given a powerful argument for the major.

Reppert asks whether it is reasonable to pass laws against abortion in a society in which large segments of the population do not oppose abortion.  Well, was it reasonable to pass laws against slavery in a society in which large segments of the population did not oppose slavery?

Suppose we become even more morally depraved than we are now. We get to the point where the majority considers infanticide  morally acceptable. Would it be reasonable to do away with the laws proscribing it?  Or the laws proscribing child pornography? Or rape laws? Should the law merely reflect the going moral sentiment no matter how decadent it becomes?

I'll leave you with these questions.

God, Simplicity, Freedom, and Two Senses of ‘Contingency’

Fr. Aidan Kimel wants me to comment on his recent series of posts about divine simplicity, freedom, and the contingency of creation. In the third of his entries, he provides the following quotation:

As Matthew Levering puts it: “God could be God without creatures, and so his willing of creatures cannot have the absolute necessity that his willing of himself has” (Engaging the Doctrine of Creation, p. 103). That is the fact of the case, as it were. Granted the making of the world by a simple, immutable, and eternal Deity, we have no choice but to accept the apparent aporia:

Indeed, there is no ‘moment’ in God’s eternity in which he does not will all that he wills; there is no God ‘prior’ to God’s will to create. In this sense, God can be said to will necessarily everything that he wills. The potency or possibility stems not from God’s will, but from the contingent nature of the finite things willed; they do not and cannot determine the divine will. (Levering, p. 103)

The problem is to understand how the following  propositions can all be true:

1) There is no absolute necessity that God create: "God could be God without creatures."

2) God created (better: ongoingly creates and sustains) the universe we inhabit.

3) God, being simple or metaphysically incomposite, is devoid of potency-act composition and unexercised powers: God is pure act.

4) The universe we inhabit, and indeed any universe God creates, is modally contingent: it does not exist of metaphysical necessity.

The problem, in brief, is to understand how a universe that is the product of a divine act of willing that is necessary (given God's simplicity) can yet be contingent. Levering's answer does not help at all. In fact, he seems to be confusing two senses of contingency when he says that "the contingent nature of the finite things willed" does not determine the divine will.  That's right, it doesn't and for the simple reason that the finite things willed depend entirely on the divine will and are in this sense contingent upon the divine will; but this is not the relevant sense of 'contingency.' Let me explain.

In the modal sense, a contingent item is one that is possible to be and possible not to be, as Aquinas says somewhere. In 'possible worlds' jargon, x is modally contingent =df x exists in some but not all metaphysically (broadly logically) possible worlds.  

In the dependency sense, x is dependently contingent =df there is  some y such that (i) x is not identical to y; (ii) necessarily, if x exists, then y exists; (iii) y is in some sense the ground or source of x's existence. 

It is important to see that an item can be (a) modally contingent without being dependently contingent, and (b) dependently contingent without being modally contingent.

Russell v. CoplestonAd (a). If the universe is a brute fact, as Russell (in effect) stated in his famous BBC debate with Copleston, then the universe exists, exists modally contingently, but has no cause or explanation of its existence.  If the universe is a brute fact, then of course it does not depend on God for its existence.  Its existence is a factum brutum without cause or explanation. It is contingent, but not contingent upon anything. It is modally but not dependently contingent.

Ad (b). Not all necessary beings are "created equal."  That is because one of them, God, is not created at all. The others are creatures, at least for Aquinas. (A creature is anything that is created by God.) The number 7 serves as an example, as does the proposition that 7 is prime.  That proposition is a necessary being. (If it weren't it could not be necessarily true.)  But it has its necessity "from another," namely, from God, whereas God has his necessity "from himself."  The doctor angelicus himself makes this distinction.

These so-called 'abstract objects' — not the best terminology but the going terminology — are creatures, and, insofar forth, dependent on God, and therefore contingent upon God, and therefore (by my above definition), dependently contingent. They are dependently contingent but modally necessary. 

Now let's apply the distinction to our problem. The problem, again, is this: How can the product of a necessary creating be contingent? One might think to solve the problem as follows.  God necessarily creates, but what he creates is nonetheless contingent because  what he creates is wholly dependent on God for its existence at every moment. But this is no solution because it involves an equivocation on 'contingent.'

The problem is: How can the product of a modally necessary creating be modally contingent? 

Think of it this way. (I assume that the reader is en rapport with 'possible worlds' talk.) If God is simple, and he creates U in one world, then he creates U in all worlds. But then U exists in every world, in which case U is necessary. But U is contingent, hence not necessary. Therefore, either God does not exist or God is not simple, or U is not a divine creation.  

Fr. Kimel wanted me to comment on his posts. One comment is that they are top-heavy with quotations.  Quote less, argue and analyze more.

Now I would like the good padre to tell me whether he agrees with me.  I think he just might inasmuch as he speaks of an aporia.  We have good reasons to believe that God is simple, and we have good reasons to believe that the created universe is modally contingent. Suppose both propositions are true. Then they must be logically consistent.  But we cannot understand how they could both be true. So what do we do?

One way out is to jettison the divine simplicity. (But then we end having to say that God is a being among beings and neither I nor Kimel will countenance that, and for good reasons.) A second way is by denying that the created universe is contingent, either by maintaining that it is necessary or by denying that there is any real modality, that all (non-deontic) modality is epistemic.  The second way leads to a load of difficulties.

A third way is by arguing that there is no inconsistency. But I have argued that there is both above and in other recent posts dealing with the dreaded 'modal collapse.'  And it seems to me that my argumentation is cogent.

Well suppose it is. And suppose that the relevant propositions are all true. There is yet another way out. We can go mysterian.  The problem is a genuine aporia. It is insoluble by us. God is simple; he freely created our universe; it is modally contingent.  How is this possible? The answer is beyond our ken. It is a mystery.

Now if Fr. Kimel is maintaining something like this, then we agree.

Corrigendum (9/25). A reader points out, correctly, that in the above graphic the gentleman on the left is not Fr. Copleston, but A. J. Ayer.

Millianism and Presentism: An Aporetic Pentad

A Millian about proper names holds that the meaning of a proper name is exhausted by its referent. Thus the meaning of 'Socrates' is Socrates.  The meaning just is the denotatum. Fregean sense and reasonable facsimiles thereof  play no role in reference. If so, vacuous names, names without denotata, are meaningless.

Presentism, roughly, is the claim that present items alone exist. This implies that no past or future items exist in the sense of 'exists' that the presentist shares with the eternalist who maintains that past, present, and future individuals all exist.  What exactly this sense is is a nut we will leave for later cracking. 

Now Socrates is a wholly past individual: he existed, but he does presently exist. It follows on presentism that Socrates does not exist at all. The point is not the tautology that Socrates, who is wholly past, does not exist at present. The point is that our man does not exist, period: he is now nothing at all.  

We now have the makings of an aporetic pentad:

1) 'Socrates' has meaning. (Moorean fact)

2) The meaning of a proper name is its referent.  (Millian thesis)

3) If a name refers to x, then x exists.  (Plausible assumption)

4) 'Socrates' refers to a wholly past individual. (Moorean fact)

5) There are no past individuals. (Presentism)

It is easy to see that the pentad is logically inconsistent: the limbs cannot all be true. Which should we reject?

Only three of the propositions are candidates for rejection: (2), (3), (5).   Of these three, (3) is the least rejectable, (5) is the second least rejectable, and (2) the most rejectable.

So I solve the pentad by rejecting the Millian thesis about proper names.

You might budge me from my position if you can give me a powerful argument for the Millian thesis.

Here, then, we have an 'aporetic' polyad that is not a genuine aporia. It is soluble and I just solved it.

The Recalcitrant Ostrich will probably disagree.

Presentism, Truthmakers, and Ex-Concrete Objects: Some Questions for Francesco Orilia

 Here is an interesting little antilogism to break our heads against:

A. Presentism: Only what exists at present, exists.

B. Datum: There are past-tensed truths.

C. Truthmaker Principle: If p is a contingent truth, then there is a truthmaker T such that (i) T makes true p, and (ii) T exists when p is true.

Each of these propositions is plausible, but they cannot all be true.  Any two of  the propositions, taken in conjunction, entails the negation of the remaining one. 

For example, it is true, and true now, that Kerouac wrote On the Road. This truth is both past-tensed and contingent.  So, by (C),  this truth has a truthmaker that now exists. A plausible truthmaker such as the fact of Kerouac's having written On the Road  will have to have Kerouac himself as a constituent. But Kerouac does not now exist, and if presentism is true, he does not exist at all.  Assuming that a truthmaking fact or state of affairs cannot exist unless all its constituents exist, it follows that there is no present truthmaker of the past-tensed truth in question.  So if (C) is true, then (A) is false: it cannot be the case that only what exists now, exists.  I will assume for the space of this entry that (B) cannot be reasonably denied.

So one way to solve the antilogism is by rejecting presentism. Presentists will be loathe to do this, of course, and will try to find surrogate items to serve as constituents of present truthmakers.

Different sorts of surrogate items have been proposed. I will consider the surrogate or proxy favored by Francesco Orilia in his rich and penetrating "Moderate Presentism," Philosophical Studies, March 2016. (He would not call it a surrogate or a proxy, but that is what I think it is.)

Orilia's favored surrogates are ex-concrete objects. Consider the sentence

1) Garibaldi was awake on October 26, 1860 at 8:30 a.m.

This sentence is past-tensed, and if true, then contingently true. So, if true, it needs a truthmaker. We are told that the truthmaker of (1) is the present event  or state of affairs — Orilia uses these terms interchangeably, see p. 598, n. 1) – – consisting of Garibaldi's exemplifying of the time-indexed past-tense property of having been awake on October 26, 1860 at 8:30 a. m.  But of course Orilia does not mean that concrete Garibaldi himself presently exemplifies the property in question; he means that the ex-concrete object Garibaldi presently exemplifies it.  After all, concrete Garibaldi is long gone.

What is an ex-concrete object?

The emperor Trajan is a merely past object (particular). On typical (as opposed to moderate) presentism, his being past implies that he does not exist at all. For Orilia, however, "merely past objects have not really ceased to exist, but have rather become ex-concrete." (593) The idea seems to be that they continue to exist, but with an altered categorial status. Merely past objects were concrete  but are now ex-concrete, where this means that they are "neither abstract nor concrete." (593, quotation from T. Williamson.)

So when Trajan became wholly past, he yet continued to exist as an ex-concrete object. Hence Trajan still exists — as an ex-concrete object.  And the same goes for Garibaldi. Since the statesman still exists as ex-concrete he is available now to exemplify such properties as the property of having been awake on October 26, 1860 at 8:30 a.m. His exemplification of this property constitutes a present event or state of affairs that can serve as the truthmaker for (1).

Can an item change its categorial status?

Orilia is well aware that there is something dubious about the supposition that an item can change or lose its categorial status. For it seems as clear as anything that categorial features are essentially had by the items that have them. Numbers, sets, and (Fregean) propositions are candidate abstracta. There is little or no sense to the notion that the number 9, say, could become concrete or ex-abstract. For the number 9, if abstract, is abstract in every possible world, assuming, plausibly, that numbers are necessary beings. Similarly, it is difficult to understand how a  statue, say, if destroyed could could continue to exist as an ex-concrete object. It is not even clear what this means.

Pushing further

Orilia tells us that "backward singular terms should be taken at face value as referring to the very same objects they used to refer [to] when they were not, so to speak, backward." (593, emphasis added.)   So uses of 'Garibaldi' now refer to the very same object that uses of the name refereed to when Garibaldi was alive. But now the referent is an ex-concrete object whereas then it was a concrete object. So I ask: how can concrete Garibaldi be the same as ex-concrete Garibaldi when they differ property-wise? I now invoke the contrapositive of the Indiscernibility of Identicals. 

If x, y differ property-wise, then they differ numerically; concrete Garibaldi and ex-concrete Garibaldi differ property-wise in that the former but not the latter is concrete; ergo, they cannot be numerically the same (one and the same).  If so, then the temporally forward and backward uses of singular terms such as "Garibaldi' cannot refer to the same object, contra what Orilia says.

Orilia will readily grant me that an haecceity of a wholly past concrete object, assuming there are haecceities,  is a presently existing surrogate of the individual. My question to him is: why is this not also the case for ex-concrete objects? Of course, they are not haecceities. But they too 'go proxy' in the present for past objects such as Garibaldi and Leopardi, and they too are  distinct from full-fledged concrete objects.

It seems to me that Orilia's position embodies a certain tension.  His moderate presentism denies that there are past events or states of affairs, in line with standard or typical presentism, but allows that there are past objects (589).  But these past objects are ex-concrete. The latter, then, are not past objects strictly speaking (as they would be on a B-theory) but proxies for past objects. So there may be some waffling here. Connected with this is the fact that it is not clear how concrete Garibaldi, say, relates to ex-concrete Garibaldi. We are told in effect that they are the same, but they cannot be the same. Their relation wants clarification.

Are ex-concrete objects subject to the 'aboutness worry'?

If I am sad that my classmate Janet Johnston has died and is no longer with us, presumably it is the loss of Janet herself that saddens me. There is no comfort in the thought that ex-concrete Janet is still 'with us,' any more than there would be at the thought that her haecceity, now unexemplified, is still 'with us.'

Truthmaking troubles

Yesterday I drank some Campari. What makes this past-tensed, contingent truth true?  Note the difference between:

2) BV's having yesterday drunk Campari (A case of a present object's past exemplification of an untensed property) 

and

3) BV's being such that he drank Campari yesterday (A case of a present object's present exemplification of a past-tensed property.)

(2) is a past event or state of affairs, while (3) is a present event or state of affairs. Since Orilia's moderate presentism rejects past (and future) events, he must take (3) to be the truthmaker of the truth that yesterday I drank some Campari. But it seems to me that the truthmaker of 'Yesterday I drank some Campari' is not (3), but (2).  This sentence is true because yesterday I exemplified the untensed property of drinking Campari, not because today I exemplify the past-tensed property of having drunk Campari yesterday. Why? Well, I can have the past-tensed property today only because I had the untensed property yesterday.  The latter is parasitic upon the former. 

The same problem arises for Orilia's sentence (1). We are told that the truthmaker of (1) is the present event  or state of affairs consisting of Garibaldi's exemplifying of the time-indexed past-tense property of having been awake on October 26, 1860 at 8:30 a. m. Ex-concrete Garibaldi cannot now have the time-indexed past tense property unless concrete Garibaldi had the untensed property of being awake on October 26, 1860 at 8:30 a. m. Or so it seems to me.

To conclude, I am not convinced that Orilia (the man in the middle, below) has provided us with truthmakers for past-tensed truths.

Image credit: Francesca Muccini, 5 June 2018, Recanati, Italy.  The philosopher to the left of Francesco is Mark Anderson, Francesca's husband.

IMG_0883 (3)
 

Machiavelli, Arendt, and the Important Difference between Private and Public Morality

Reader R. B. writes:

I have been enjoying your posts about immigration because they are insightful. I'm on the border (haha) about the issue for the most part. I work with illegals from Mexico (in a restaurant) so you can imagine how that plays into my thinking. The problem as I see it is this: it is extremely difficult to gain citizenship in America and extremely expensive; most immigrants do not have the money and are trying to escape their shitty situation in Mexico. They are left with a nasty choice of returning to Mexico or purchasing an illegal visa (which the majority of the time is a scam for a large amount of their money). I am a Christian so I think it's important to think about how God treats the other–the outcast, the poor, and the immigrant. 
 
A professor friend has written an interesting paper on the subject, entitled "Love and Borders."  If you have time let me know what you think. 
My overall view is as follows.  Maybe later I'll discuss the details of the paper in question.

Christian precepts such as "Turn the other cheek" and "Welcome the stranger" make sense and are salutary only within communities of the like-minded and morally decent; they make no sense and are positively harmful in the public sphere, and, a fortiori, in the international sphere.  The monastery is not the wide world.  What is conducive unto salvation in the former will get you killed in the latter.  And we know what totalitarians, whether Communists or Islamists, do when they get power: they destroy the churches, synagogues, monasteries, ashrams, and zendos. And with them are destroyed the means of transmitting the dharma, the kerygma, the law and the prophets.  

An important but troubling thought is conveyed in a recent NYT op-ed (emphasis added):

Machiavelli teaches that in a world where so many are not good, you must learn to be able to not be good. The virtues taught in our secular and religious schools are incompatible with the virtues one must practice to safeguard those same institutions. The power of the lion and the cleverness of the fox: These are the qualities a leader must harness to preserve the republic.

The problem referenced in the bolded sentence is very serious but may have no solution.  That's the aporetician in me speaking. 

The problem as I see it is that (i) the pacific virtues the practice of which makes life worth living within families, between friends, and in such institutions of civil society as churches and fraternal organizations  are essentially private and cannot be extended outward as if we are all brothers and sisters belonging to a global community.  Talk of  global community is blather.  The institutions of civil society can survive and flourish only if protected by warriors and statesmen whose virtues are of the manly and martial, not of the womanish and pacific, sort. And yet (ii) if no  extension beyond the private of the pacific virtues is possible then humanity would seem to be doomed  in an age of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction.  Besides, it is unsatisfactory that there be two moralities, one private, the other public.

Consider the Christian virtues preached by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount.  They include humility, meekness, love of righteousness, mercy, purity of heart, love of peace and of reconciliation.  Everyone who must live uncloistered in the world understands that these pacific and essentially womanish virtues have but limited application there.  Indeed, their practice can get you killed. (I am not using 'womanish' as a derogatory qualifier.)

Si vis pacem . . .You may love peace, but unless you are prepared to make war upon your enemies and show them no mercy, you may not be long for this world.  Turning the other cheek makes sense within a loving family, but no sense in the wider world.  (Would the Pope turn the other cheek if the Vatican came under attack by Muslim terrorists or would he call upon the armed might of the Italian state?)  My point is perfectly obvious in the case of states: they are in the state (condition) of nature with respect to each other. Each state secures by blood and iron a civilized space within which art and music and science and scholarship can flourish and wherein, ideally, blood does not flow; but these states and their civilizations battle each other in the state (condition) of nature red in tooth and claw.  Talk of world government or United Nations is globalist blather that hides the will to power of those who would seize control of the world government. United under which umbrella of values and principles and presuppositions?

What values do we share with the Muslim world? 

The Allies would not have been long for this world had they not been merciless in their treatment of the Axis Powers.  

Israel would have ceased to exist long ago had Israelis not been ruthless in their dealing with Muslim terrorists bent on her destruction.

This is also true of individuals once they move beyond their families and friends and genuine communities and sally forth into the wider world. 

The problem is well understood by Hannah Arendt ("Truth and Politics" in Between Past and Future, Penguin 1968, p. 245):

     The disastrous consequences for any community that began in all
     earnest to follow ethical precepts derived from man in the singular
     — be they Socratic or Platonic or Christian — have been
     frequently pointed out. Long before Machiavelli recommended
     protecting the political realm against the undiluted principles of
     the Christian faith (those who refuse to resist evil permit the
     wicked "to do as much evil as they please"), Aristotle warned
     against giving philosophers any say in political matters. (Men who
     for professional reasons must be so unconcerned with "what is good
     for themselves" cannot very well be trusted with what is good for
     others, and least of all with the "common good," the down-to-earth
     interests of the community.) [Arendt cites the Nicomachean Ethics,
     Book VI, and in particular 1140b9 and 1141b4.]

There is a tension  between man qua philosopher/Christian and man qua citizen.  As a philosopher raised in Christianity, I am concerned with my soul, with its integrity, purity, salvation. I take very seriously indeed the Socratic "Better to suffer wrong than to do it" and the Christian  "Resist not the evildoer." But as a citizen I must be concerned not only with my own well-being but also with the public welfare. This is true a fortiori of public officials and people in a position to  influence public opinion, people like Catholic bishops many of whom are woefully ignorant of the simple points Arendt makes in the passage quoted. So, as Arendt points out, the Socratic and Christian admonitions are not applicable in the public sphere.

What is applicable to me in the singular, as this existing individual concerned with the welfare of his immortal soul over that of his  perishable body, is not applicable to me as citizen. As a citizen, I   cannot "welcome the stranger" who violates the laws of my country, a stranger who may be a terrorist or a drug smuggler or a human trafficker or a carrier of a deadly disease or a person who has no respect for the traditions of the country he invades; I cannot aid and abet his law breaking. I must be concerned with public order.  This order is among  the very conditions that make the philosophical and Christian life possible in the first place. If I were to aid and abet the stranger's law breaking, I would not be "rendering unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's" as the New Testament enjoins us to do.

Indeed, the Caesar verse provides a scriptural basis for Church-State separation and indirectly exposes the fallacy of the Catholic bishops  and others who confuse private and public morality. 

The article referenced above is Thomas M. Crisp, Love and Borders. 

The Problem of Consciousness and Galen Strawson’s Non-Solution

The problem can be set forth in a nice neat way as an aporetic triad:

1) Consciousness is real; it is not an illusion.

2) Consciousness is wholly natural, a material process in the brain.

3) It is impossible that conscious states, whether object-directed or merely qualitative, be material in nature.

It is easy to see that the members of this triad are collectively inconsistent: they cannot all be true.  Any two of the propositions, taken together, entails the negation of the remaining proposition.  

And yet each limb of the triad has brilliant defenders and brilliant opponents. So not only is consciousness itself a mighty goad to inquiry; the wild diversity of opinions about it is as well.  (The second goad is an instance of what I call the Moorean motive for doing philosophy: G. E. Moore did not get his problems from the world, but from the strange and mutually contradictory things philosophers said about the world, e.g., that time is unreal (McTaggart) or that nothing is really related (Bradley).)

The above problem is soluble if a compelling case can be made for the rejection of one of the limbs.  But which one? Eliminativists reject (1); dualists of all types, and not just substance dualists, reject (2); materialists reject (3).  

I agree with Strawson that eliminativism has zero credibility.  (1) is self-evident and the attempts to deny it are easily convicted of incoherence.  So no solution is to be had by rejecting (1).

As for (2), it is overwhelmingly credible to most at the present time.  We live in a secular age.  'Surely' — the secularist will assure us — there is nothing concrete that is supernatural.  God and the soul are just comforting fictions from a bygone era. The natural exhausts the real.  Materialism about the mind is just logical fallout from naturalism.  If all that (concretely) exists is space-time and its contents, then the same goes for minds and their states.

Strawson, accepting both (1) and (2) must reject (3).  But the arguments against (3), one of which I will sketch below, are formidable. The upshot of these arguments is that it is unintelligible how either qualia or intentional states of consciousness could be wholly material in nature.  Suppose I told you that there is a man who is both fully human and fully divine. You would say that that makes no sense, is unintelligible, and is impossible for that very reason. Well, it is no less unintelligible that a felt sensation such as my present blogger's euphoria be identical to a state of my brain.  

What could a materialist such as Strawson say in response? He has to make a mysterian move. 

He could say that our understanding of matter at present does not allow us to understand how conscious experience could be wholly material in nature, but that it is nevertheless wholly material in nature! Some matter is sentient and some matter thinks. My euphoria is literally inside my skull and so are my thoughts about Boston. 

(Compare the orthodox Chalcedonian incarnationalist who says that the man Jesus of Nazareth is identical to the Second Person of the Trinity. Put him under dialectical pressure and he might say, "Look it is true! We know it by divine revelation. And what is true is true whether or not we can understand how it is possible that it be true. It must remain a mystery to us here below.)

Or a materialist mysterian  can say that our understanding of matter will never allow us to understand how conscious experience could be wholly material in nature.  Either way, conscious experience, whether intentional or non-intentional, is wholly material in nature, and falls entirely within the subject-matter of physics, whether a future physics achievable by us, or a physics which, though not achievable by us, is perhaps achievable by organisms of a different constitution who study us.

If I understand Galen Strawson's view, it is the first.  Conscious experience is fully real but wholly material in nature despite the fact that on current physics we cannot account for its reality: we cannot understand how it is possible for qualia and thoughts to be wholly material.   Here is a characteristic passage from Strawson: 

Serious materialists have to be outright realists about the experiential. So they are obliged to hold that experiential phenomena just are physical phenomena, although current physics cannot account for them.  As an acting materialist, I accept this, and assume that experiential phenomena are "based in" or "realized in" the brain (to stick to the human case).  But this assumption does not solve any problems for materialists.  Instead it obliges them to admit ignorance of the nature of the physical, to admit that they don't have a fully adequate idea of what the physical is, and hence of what the brain is.  ("The Experiential and the Non-Experiential" in Warner and Szubka, p. 77)

Strawson and I agree on two important points.  One is that what he calls experiential phenomena are as real as anything and cannot be eliminated or reduced to anything non-experiential. Dennett denied! The other is that there is no accounting for experiential items in terms of current physics.

I disagree on whether his mysterian solution is a genuine solution to the problem. What he is saying is that, given the obvious reality of conscious states, and given the truth of naturalism, experiential phenomena must be material in nature, and that this is so whether or not we are able to understand how it could be so.  At present we cannot understand how it could be so. It is at present a mystery. But the mystery will dissipate when we have a better understanding of matter.

This strikes me as bluster.

An experiential item such as a twinge of pain or a rush of elation is essentially subjective; it is something whose appearing just is its reality.  For qualia, esse = percipi.  If I am told that someday items like this will be exhaustively understood from a third-person point of view as objects of physics, I have no idea what this means.  The notion strikes me as absurd.  We are being told in effect that what is essentially subjective will one day be exhaustively understood as both essentially subjective and wholly objective.  And that makes no sense. If you tell me that understanding in physics need not be objectifying understanding, I don't know what that means either.

As Strawson clearly appreciates, one cannot reduce a twinge of pain to a pattern of neuron firings, for such a reduction eliminates the what-it-is-like-ness  of the experience.  And so he inflates the concept of the physical to cover both the physical and the mental.  But by doing this he drains the physical of definite meaning.  His materialism is a vacuous materialism. We no longer have any idea of what 'physical' means if it no longer contrasts with 'mental.'

If we are told that sensations and thoughts are wholly material, we have a definite proposition only if 'material' contrasts with 'mental.' But if we are told that sensations and thoughts are material, but that matter in reality has mental properties and powers, then I say you are talking nonsense.  You are creating grammatically correct sentences that do not express a coherent thought.

Besides, if some matter in reality senses and thinks, surely some matter doesn't; hence we are back to dualism.

Why is Strawson's  mysterianism any better than Dennett's eliminativism?  Both are materialists. And both are keenly aware of the problem that qualia pose.  This is known in the trade as the 'hard problem.' (What? The other problems in the vicinity are easy?) The eliminativist simply denies the troublesome data. Qualia don't exist! They are illusory!  The mysterian materialist cannot bring himself to say something so manifestly silly. But, unwilling to question his materialism, he says something that is not much better. He tells us that qualia are real, and wholly material, but we don't understand how because we don't know enough about matter.  But this 'theological' solution is also worthless because no definite proposition is being advanced.

Strawson frankly confesses, "I am by faith a materialist." (p. 69)  Given this faith, experiential items, precisely as experiential, must be wholly material in nature.  This faith engenders the hope that future science will unlock the secret.  Strawson must pin his hope on future science because of his clear recognition that experiential items are incomprehensible in terms of current physics.

But what do the theological virtues of faith and hope have to do with sober inquiry?  It doesn't strike me as particularly  intellectually honest to insist that materialism just has to be true and to uphold it by widening the concept of the physical to embrace what is mental.  It would be more honest just to admit that the problem of consciousness is insoluble.

And that is my 'solution.' The problem is real, but insoluble by us.

Strawson's latest banging on his mysterian materialist drum is to be found in The Consciousness Deniers in The New York Review of Books.

Is a Dead Man Mortal?

An Inconsistent Tetrad

a. Socrates is mortal.
b. Socrates is dead.
c. A man is mortal only if there is a future time at which he dies.
d. A man cannot die twice.

If all men are mortal, and Socrates is a man, then Socrates is mortal. But Socrates is dead. Now a man is mortal only if there is a future time at which he dies. But a man cannot die twice, and so there is no future time at which Socrates dies.

The limbs of the tetrad cannot all be true, yet each seems true.

Should we conclude that the dead are not mortal?

First question: Is the tetrad a genuine aporia, or is it soluble?

Second question: If soluble, what is the most plausible solution?

The Concept of ‘Standoff’ in Philosophy

The following two propositions are collectively logically inconsistent and yet each is very plausible:

1. Being dead is not an evil for any dead person at any time. 

2. Being dead at a young age is an evil for some dead persons.

Obviously, the limbs of the dyad cannot both be true.  Each entails the negation of the other.  And yet each limb lays serious claim to our acceptance. If you have been following the recent Epicurean discussions in these pages, you know that very plausible arguments can be given for both members of this pair of contradictories.

If philosopher A urges (1) and philosopher B urges (2), and neither can convince the other,  then I say that A and B are in a standoff.

On the other hand, there cannot be sound arguments for both limbs. This is because there are no true contradictions. A plausible argument needn't be sound. And a sound argument needn't be plausible. A sound argument, by commonly accepted definition, is a valid deductive argument all of the premises of which are true. It is easy to see that every such argument must have a true conclusion.

So I say that the above standoff is dialectical, not logical. 

This means that what generates the standoff or impasse are not logical norms and notions taken in abstracto and applied to propositions taken in abstracto,  but logic embedded and applied in a concrete dialogue situation playing out between two or more finite and fallible agents who are trying to arrive at a rational resolution of a difficult question.  I will assume that the interlocutors are sincere truth seekers possessing the intellectual virtues.  There is thus nothing polemical about their conflict. Of course, some standoffs are polemical, most political ones for example, but at the moment I am not worrying about polemical standoffs. Nor am I concerned with physical standoffs or the sort of standoff that occurs in a game of chess when neither side has sufficient mating material. 

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, (3) and (4) form a contradictory pair and so cannot both be true.  And yet one can argue plausibly for each.

This is not the place for detailed arguments, but in support of (3) there are the standard Anselmian considerations. God is ens perfectissimum; nothing perfect could be modally contingent; ergo, etc. God is "that than which no greater can be conceived"; if God were a merely contingent being, then a greater could be conceived; ergo, etc.

In support of (4), there is the difficulty of understanding how any concrete individual could exist necessarily. For such a being, possibility suffices for actuality: if God is possible, then he is actual. But this possibility is not mere possibility; it is the possibility of an actual being.  (God is at no time or in any possible world merely possible, if he is possible at all.) The divine possibility — if it is a possibility at all and not an impossibility — is a possibility that is fully actualized. Possibility and actuality in God are one and the same in reality even though they remain notionally distinct for us.  (In classical jargon, God is pure act, actus purus.) Equivalently, essence and existence in God are one and the same in reality even if they must remain notionally distinct for our discursive intellects.  It is God's nature to exist. God is an existing essence in virtue of his very essence. God's existence is in no way subsequent to his essence, not temporally, of course, but also not logically or ontologically. So it is not quite right to say, as many do, that God's nature entails his existence; God's nature is his existence, and his existence is his nature.

If you think this through very carefully, you will realize that the ground of the divine necessity is the divine simplicity.  It is because God is an ontologically simple being that he is a necessary being.  If you deny that God is simple but affirm that he is necessary, then I will challenge you to state what makes him necessary as opposed to impossible. If you say that God is necessary in virtue of existing in all possible worlds, then I will point out that that gets us nowhere: it is simply an extensional way of saying that God is necessary.  

Divine simplicity implies no real distinctions in God, and thus no real distinction between essence and existence. It is the identity of essence and existence in God that is the root, source, ground of the divine necessity. The problem is that we, with our discursive intellects, cannot understand how this could be.  Anything we conceive as existent, we can also conceive as nonexistent. (Hume) The discursive intellect cannot grasp the possibility of a simple being, and so it cannot grasp the possibility of a necessary concretum.  Here then we have the makings of an argument that, in reality, every concretum is contingent, which is equivalent to the negation of (4).

So if one philosopher urges (3) and his interlocutor (4), and neither can convince the other, then the two are in a standoff.

Now you may quibble with my examples, but there are fifty more I could give (and you hope I won't).

Philosophy is its problems and these are in canonical form when cast in the mold of aporetic polyads.  The typical outcome, however, is not a solution but a standoff.

The Inquirer, the Dogmatist, the Theoretical and the Practical

I have so far characterized in a preliminary way what a standoff in philosophy is, and I have given a couple of examples in support of the claim that there are standoffs in philosophy.  But there are those who are loathe to accept that there are such standoffs.  These are people with overpowering doxastic security needs: they have an irresistible  need to be secure in their beliefs.  They don't cotton to the idea that many of the deepest problems are insoluble by us. These are people in whom the dogmatic tendency wins out over the inquiring/skeptical tendency.  Among these are people who think one can PROVE the existence of God, or prove the opposite. Among them are those who are CERTAIN that there are substances in the Aristotelian sense of the term. It would be easy to multiply examples.

As I see it, the spirit of genuine philosophy is anti-dogmatic.  A real philosopher does not bluster. He does not claim to know what he does not know, and in some cases, cannot know. A real philosopher does not confuse subjective conviction with objective certainty. He has time and he takes time. He can tolerate suspense and open questions. But his suspension is not a Pyrrhonian abandonment of inquiry, but is in the service of it. His happiness is not a porcine ataraxia, but the happiness of the hunt. Unlike the dogmatist, however, he has high standards with the result that is hunt is long and perhaps endless as long as he remains in statu viae wandering among the charms and horrors of the sublunary.

And yet we are participants in life's parade and not mere spectators of it. Curiously, we are both part of the passing scene and observers of it.  To us as participants in the flux and shove of the real order a certain amount of bluster has proven to be life-enhancing and practically necessary. To live is to maneuver, to position oneself, to take a position, to adopt a stance, to grab one's piece of the action and defend it, and in the clinch to shoot first and philosophize later.

As so we are torn. It is a broken world and we are broken on its samsaric wheel. To put it grandly,  the human condition is a tragic predicament. We must act in conditions of poor lighting, maintaining ourselves in the Cave's chiaroscuro, with little more than faith and hope to keep us going. At the same time we seek light, light, more light and the transformation of faith into knowledge and hope into having. 

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Benatar on Annihilation and the Existence Requirement

Herewith, the eighth installment  in a series on David Benatar's The Human Predicament (Oxford UP, 2017). We are still in the  juicy and technically rich Chapter 5 entitled "Death."  This entry covers pp. 102-118. People who dismiss this book unread are missing out on a lot of good philosophy. You are no philosopher if you refuse to examine arguments the conclusions of which adversely affect your doxastic complacency.

Epicurus-quotes-2Epicurus, you will recall, is the presiding shade. His core idea, presented very simply, is that death can be nothing to us since when we are, it is not, and when it is, we are not. How then can death be bad for the person who dies? But for Benatar, being dead is bad, objectively bad, and for all. So our man faces an Epicurean challenge. I concluded a few entries back that he met the challenge in its Hedonist Variant.

If the only intrinsic goods and bads are conscious or experiential states, then being dead can't be bad since the dead don't experience anything.  But there are intrinsic goods and bads that are not experiential. If so, then being dead can be bad in virtue of depriving the decedent of goods that would otherwise have accrued to him.  A good or a bad can accrue to one even if it cannot be experienced by the one to whom it accrues.* That, roughly, is the Deprivation Response to the Epicurean challenge.

Benatar supplements it with the Annihilation Response: death is bad for the person who dies because it annihilates or obliterates him, whether or not it deprives him of future goods that he would otherwise have had. (102-103) One has an interest not only in future goods, but also an "independent interest" in continued existence.

The Existence Requirement

One fairly intuitive objection to the Deprivation Response, even when supplemented by the Annihilation Response, runs as follows. How can a person be deprived of anything, whether positive feelings or non-experiential goods, if he does not exist at the time the deprivation occurs?  The Existence Requirement, then, is this:

ER. In order for something to be bad or good for somebody, that being must actually exist at the time at which the bad occurs. (111, 115)

It is not enough for the person to exist; the person must exist at the time at which the bad occurs. But when a person is dead, he is no more, so when is the badness of death upon him? Not when he is dead, given the truth of (ER). Recoiling from "Subsequentism," some have adopted "Priorism," the view that death is bad before the person dies. But how can being dead be bad for me if I am alive and kicking? Benatar goes on to consider three other unlikely views.  But brevity is the soul of blog, and so I will ignore this discussion and jump to what I consider the heart of the matter.

The Aporetics of Being Dead

I lay it down that a philosophical problem is in canonical form when it is expressed as an aporetic polyad. When the problem before us is poured into the mold of an inconsistent triad, it fairly jumps out at us:

1) Mortalism: Death ends a person's existence.

2) Existence Requirement: For something to be bad for somebody, he must exist at the time it is bad for him.

3) Badness of Death: Being dead is bad for the one who dies.

The limbs of the triad are collectively inconsistent: they cannot (logically) all be true. Any two of the above propositions, taken together, entail the negation of the remaining one.  For example, the conjunction of (1) and (2) entails the negation of (3). And yet each of the propositions makes a strong claim on our acceptance.

How do we solve this bad boy?  Given that logically inconsistent propositions cannot all be true. we need to reject one of the propositions. Which one?

The Epicurean denies (3) and accepts (1) and (2). Benatar denies (2) and accepts (1) and (3). Benatar

. . . see[s] no reason why we should treat the existence requirement as a requirement. To insist that the badness of death must be analyzed in exactly the same way as other bad things that do not have the distinctive feature of death is to be insensitive to a complexity in the way the world is. (115)

Now is there any way to decide rationally between the two positions? I don't see a way. 

I was initially inclined to hold that the Existence Requirement holds across the board, even for the 'state' of being dead. To put it rhetorically, how can it be bad for me to be dead when there is no 'me' at the times I am dead? It seems self-evident! Epicurus vindicatus est. But what is the source of the self-evidence? 

The source seems to be the assumption that the 'state' of being dead and the state of having a broken leg are states in exactly the same sense of the term.  If they are, then (ER) follows. But Benatar has brought me to see that it is not obvious that being dead is a state like any other.

The bad of a broken leg is had by me only at times at which I exist. This makes it natural to think that the bad of being dead, if a bad it is, is had by me only when I exist, which implies that being dead is not bad. But death is very different from other bad things. (115) Perhaps we can say that the bad of death is sui generis. If so, then we ought not expect it to satisfy the Existence Requirement.

We seem to be at an impasse. On the one hand we have the strong intuition that death is bad for the one who dies in that it (a) deprives the person of the goods he would otherwise have enjoyed or had non-experientially, and (b) annihilates the person.  This is part of the explanation why Epicurean reasoning smacks of sophistry to so many.  On he other hand, The Existence Requirement obtrudes itself upon the mind with no little force and vivacity.  Our Czech colleague Vlastimil V finds it self-evident.

Benatar, however, thinks it merely "clever" to adopt the Existence Requirement, but "wise" to recognize that death is different from other bad things. (115-116)  The wise course is to "respond to difference with difference and to complexity with nuance." (116)

Given my aporetic bent, I am inclined to say that the triad is rationally insoluble. I see no compelling reason to take either the side of Benatar or that of Epicurus. 

What say you, Vlastimil?

________________

*The following example, mine, not Benatar's, might show this to be the case. A philosopher is holed up, totally incommunicado, in a hermitage at a remote monastery in the high desert of New Mexico.  While there, the Schopenhauer Gesellschaft awards him its coveted Pessimist of the Year Award which brings with it a subtantial emolument. Unfortunately, our philosopher dies at the very instant the award is made. Not only does he not become aware of the award; he cannot become aware of it. And yet something good happened to him. Therefore, not everything good that happens to one need be something of which one is aware or even can be aware. And the same goes for the the bad. 

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A Defense of David Benatar Against a Scurrilous <i>New Criterion</i> Attack
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The Puzzle of Dion and Theon

This puzzle, similar to Peter Geach's Tibbles the Cat in content, is unlike it in vintage. Its origin is attributed by Philo of Alexandria (30 B.C. – 45 A. D.) to Chrysippus the Stoic (c. 280 B.C. – c. 206 B. C.) What follows is my take on the puzzle. I draw heavily upon Michael B. Burke, "Dion and Theon: An Essentialist Solution to an Ancient Puzzle," The Journal of Philosophy, 1994, pp. 129-139.

DionYesterday, Dion was a whole man, but today he had his left foot successfully amputated. Yesterday, 'Theon' was introduced as a name for that proper part of Dion that consisted of the whole of Dion except his left foot. (To keep the formulation of the puzzle simple, let us assume that dualism is false and that Dion is just a living human organism.) It is clear that yesterday Dion and Theon were numerically distinct individuals, the reason being that yesterday Theon was a proper part of Dion.  (By definition of 'proper part,' if x is a proper part of y, then x is not identical to y.  And if x and y are not identical, then x and y are distinct.  Two items can be distinct without being wholly distinct.)  Now the question is which of the following is true today, after the amputation:

Creation, Existence, and Extreme Metaphysical Realism

 This entry is a continuation of the ruminations in The Ultimate Paradox of Divine Creation.

Recapitulation

Divine creation ex nihilo is a spiritual/mental 'process' whereby an object of the divine consciousness is posited as non-object, as more than a merely intentional object, and thus as a transcendent reality. By 'transcendent reality' I mean an item that is not immanent to consciousness, whether human or divine,  but exists on its own. And by 'consciousness' in this discussion I mean intentional (object-directed) consciousness. 

(I deny that every instance of consciousness is a consciousness of something: there are, I claim in agreement with Searle, non-intentional conscious states, states not directed upon an object.   See Searle on Non-Intentional Mental States and the  good ComBox discussion to which Harry Binswanger and David Gordon contribute. Objectivist Binswanger disagrees with Searle and me. And even if every consciousness is a consciousness of something, it does not follow that every consciousness is a conscious of something that exists.)

So God creates independent reals. What he creates exists on its own, independently, an sich. At the same time, however, what he creates he sustains moment-by-moment. At every moment of its existence the creature depends on the Creator for the whole of its Being, for its existence, its nature, as well as for such  transcendental determinations as its intelligibility and goodness.  Ens et verum convertuntur is grounded in God's being the ultimate source of all truth,and ens et bonum convertuntur is grounded in God's being The Good itself and thus the ultimate source of all goodness in creatures.

Creatures, then, depend for their whole Being on the Creator according to the classical conception of divine creation that involves both an original bringing-into-existence (creatio originans) and an ongoing conservation of what has been brought into existence (creatio continuans). And yet creatures exist on their own, independently. As I emphasized in the earlier post, finite persons are the prime examples of this independence. And yet how is such independence possible given divine conservation? It appears to issue in a contradiction: the creature exists both independently and dependently.

Does it follow that a creator God does not exist? (It would take a separate post to show that a God worth his salt cannot be conceived along deistic lines.)

Rand to the Rescue?

Thinking about this I recalled Ayn Rand and her notorious axiom, "Existence exists." On a charitable reading it is not the tautology that whatever exists, exists, but expresses an extreme metaphysical realism: whatever exists exists independently of all consciousness, including divine consciousness.  But then it follows that God cannot exist, and our problem dissolves. Here, then, is a Rand-inspired argument for the nonexistence of God resting on Rand's axiom of existence.

1) To exist is to exist independently of all consciousness. (The notorious axiom)

2) Things other than God exist. (Obviously true)

Therefore

3) Things other than God exist independently of all consciousness. (Follows from 1 and 2)

4) If God exists, then it is not the case that everything that exists exists independently of all consciousness. (True given the classical conception of God as creator)

Therefore

5) God does not exist. (Follows from 3 and 4 by standard logical rules including modus tollens)

Is there any good reason not to accept the above argument?  

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