Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Aporetics

  • The Existence of Consciousness: An Aporetic Tetrad

    I tend to the view that all philosophical problems can be represented as aporetic polyads.  What's more, I maintain that philosophical problems ought to be so represented.  You haven't begun to philosophize until you have a well-defined puzzle, a putative inconsistency of plausibilities.  When you have an aporetic polyad on the table you have something to think…

  • A Quasi-Pyrrhonian Metaphilosophical Puzzle

    Some of us are tempted by the metathesis (MT) that every substantive philosophical thesis is such that the arguments for it and the arguments against it are equally plausible and thus 'cancel out.' But the metathesis is itself a philosophical thesis. So if the metathesis is true, then every argument in support of it is…

  • Thomas Nagel on the Mind-Body Problem

    Nagel replies in the pages of NYRB (8 June 2017; HT: Dave Lull) to one Roy Black, a professor of bioengineering: The mind-body problem that exercises both Daniel Dennett and me is a problem about what experience is, not how it is caused. The difficulty is that conscious experience has an essentially subjective character—what it…

  • Divine Simplicity: Is God Identical to His Thoughts?

    Theophilus inquires, I've been researching the doctrine of divine simplicity (DDS) recently and I've had a hard time figuring something out. On DDS, is it the case that God is identical with his thoughts? Surely on the view (as you say in your SEP article) God is identical with his omniscience. But does that also…

  • The Dilemma of Sebastian Rodrigues in Endo’s Silence: Ethical or Merely Psychological?

    This entry assumes familiarity with the story recounted by Shusaku Endo in his novel, Silence. Philip L. Quinn's "Tragic Dilemmas, Suffering Love, and Christian Life" (The Journal of Religious Ethics, vol. 17, no. 1, Spring 1989, 151-183) is the best discussion of the central themes of the novel I have read. I thank Vlastimil Vohanka…

  • Is a Dead Person Mortal?

    To be mortal is to be subject to death just as to be breakable is to be subject to breakage.  But whereas a wine glass is fragile/breakable even if there is no future time at which it breaks, a man is mortal only if there is a future time at which he dies. If there…

  • War, Torture, and the Aporetics of Moral Rigorism

    That the deliberate targeting of noncombatants is intrinsically evil and cannot be justified under any circumstances is one of the entailments of Catholic just war doctrine.  I am sensitive to its moral force. I am strongly inclined to say that certain actions are intrinsically wrong, wrong by their very nature as the types of actions…

  • Can You Harm a Dead Man?

    It would be pleasant to think that when one is dead one will be wholly out of harm's way.  But is that true?  Here is some Epicurean reasoning: 1. Death is annihilation. (Materialist assumption)2. A harm is a harm to someone or something: for there to be a harm, there must be a subject of harm.…

  • The Movies Inside Our Heads

    Scott Adams: As I often tell you, we all live in our own movies inside our heads. Humans did not evolve with the capability to understand their reality because it was not important to survival. Any illusion that keeps us alive long enough to procreate is good enough. Adams is telling us either directly or…

  • Creation: Ex Nihilo or Ex Deo?

    Classical theists hold that God created the world ex nihilo, out of nothing. This phrase carries a privative, not a positive, sense: it means not out of something as opposed to out of something called ‘nothing.’ This much is crystal clear. Less clear is how creation ex nihilo (CEN), comports, if it does comport, with…

  • Is the Real a Tricycle? Plantinga versus Hick, Round One

    In his Warranted Christian Belief (Oxford UP, 2000), Alvin Plantinga mounts a critique of John Hick's Kantianism in the philosophy of religion.  In this entry I will begin an evaluation of Plantinga's critique.  I will focus on just two and a half pages, pp. 43-45, and examine only one preliminary argument. The question, very simply,…

  • Does Reality Have a Sentence-Like Structure?

     Our problem may be formulated as an antilogism, or aporetic triad: A. Some sentences are true in virtue of their correspondence with extralinguistic reality. B. If so, then reality must have a sentence-like structure. C. Reality does not have a sentence-like structure. This trio of propositions is inconsistent. And yet one can make a plausible…

  • The Problem of Dirty Hands

    I am trying to understand the structure of the problem of dirty hands. A clear example of a dirty hands situation is one in which a political leader authorizes the intentional slaughter of innocent non-combatants to demoralize the enemy and bring about the end of a war which, if it continues, could be reasonably expected…

  • Political Argumentation: The Cogency of the ‘Hillary is Worse’ Defense

    The Trump phenomenon provides excellent fodder for the study of political reasoning. Herewith, some thoughts on the cogency of the 'Hillary is Worse' defense for voting for Trump. I'll start with some assumptions. A1. We are conservatives. A2. It is Trump versus Hillary in the general: Sanders will not get the Democrat Party nod, nor…

  • Bare Particulars and Prime Matter: Similarities and Differences

    This entry continues the discussion of prime matter begun here. That post is a prerequisite for this one. Similarities between Bare Particulars and Prime Matter S1. Bare particulars in themselves are property-less while prime matter in itself is formless.   The bare particular in a thing is that which exemplifies the thing's properties.  But in itself…