Autobiographical – Page 9 – Maverick Philosopher

Philosophers as Bad Drivers?

Just over the transom:

C.J. F. Williams told me a [Richard] Swinburne story. Swinburne offered to give him a lift to some philosophy conference, but warned him ‘I only drive at 30 miles an hour’. Christopher thought he meant that he strictly abided by the urban 30 mph speed limit, and accepted the lift.

It turned out that Swinburne never ever drove more than 30 mph, even on the freeway, where in the UK the limit is 70 mph. It took a while to get to there.

Slow is not safe on freeways. Swinburne is lucky to have lived long enough to be insulted by the Society of Christian Philosophers.

I have heard rumors to the effect that David Lewis was 'automotively challenged.'

My old friend Quentin Smith didn't drive at all.

One of the reasons that philosophers from Thales on have been the laughingstock of Thracian maids and other members of hoi polloi is that many of them are incompetent in practical matters.

Quentin was just hopeless in mundane matters. The tales I could tell, the telling of which loyalty forbids.

Me? I'm an excellent driver, a good cook, a pretty good shot, competent in elementary plumbing, electrical, and automotive change-outs and repairs, and well-versed in personal finance.

A life well-lived is a balanced life. You should strive to develop all sides of your personality: intellectual, spiritual, artistic, emotional, and physical.

Addenda

Here is an obituary of C. J. F. Williams by Richard Swinburne.

It came as news to me that Williams spent most of his life in a wheelchair. It testifies to the possibilities of the human spirit that great adversity for some is no impediment to achievement. I think also of Stephen Hawking, Charles Krauthammer, and FDR.

So stop whining and be grateful for what you have. You could be in a bloody wheelchair!

UPDATE (11/21).

J. H. writes,

Your blog post "Philosophers as Bad Drivers" brought back to memory a philosophy professor that I had as an undergrad and a story he told us about himself.

Dr. Ken Ferguson (https://www.ecu.edu/cs-acad/ugcat/philFaculty.cfm) told us a story one day about his time in one of the branches of the military. While serving, an officer instructed him to move a jeep. Ferguson says he objected and explained to the officer that he simply could not drive. The officer wasn't sympathetic to his excuse and doubled down on his request. Ferguson said that he attempted to follow the orders and ended up wrecking the jeep and some other equipment. He was not asked to drive again.

Ferguson said that he simply does not drive. Multiple times I remember seeing him walking down one of the main streets leading to campus in what I suspect was a distance of at least over two miles in the morning, and while always wearing a full suit at that!

Thanks for the story! Ferguson is a counterexample to the famous Stirling Moss quotation: “There are two things no man will admit he cannot do well: drive and make love.”

One of the reasons philosophy and philosophers get such bad press among the general public is because of the high number of oddballs and incompetents in philosophy. Your former professor mught have had a number of good reasons for never learning how to drive. But I would argue that there are certain things every man ought to know how to do and they include knowing how to drive cars and trucks of various sizes and operate a stick shift. Like it or not, we are material beings in a material world and knowing how to negotiate this world is important for us and those with whom we come into contact.

We should develop ourselves as fully and many-sidedly as possible so as to be worthy acolytes of our noble mistress, fair Philosophia. We represent her to the public.

A Philosopher on the Midlife Crisis

Kieran Setiya, The Midlife Crisis. An outstanding essay. What exactly is a midlife crisis?

In the form that will concern us, then, the midlife crisis is an apparent absence of meaning or significance in life that allows for the continued presence of reasons to act. Although it is often inspired by the acknowledgement of mortality, the crisis can occur in other ways. It may be enough to prompt the midlife crisis that you see in your future, at best, only more of the achievements and projects that make up your past. Your life will differ only in quantity from the life you have already lived, a mere accumulation of deeds.

A weblog as I envisage it is a form of writing that is midway between the unpublished privacy of the personal journal and the publicity of an article published in a professional journal. The blogs that interest me the most are thus those that include some of the self-reference of a Facebook page absent the full-bore, and boring, narcissism that characterizes most of them while retaining, in the main, an objective trans-personal focus. This by way of justifying some talk of myself.

Setiya's characterization of the midlife crisis fits my case almost exactly. My crisis lasted a long four years, starting at age 41. In the fifth year, a year's worth of travel and teaching and study in Turkey pulled me out of it. Three years later, at age 49, I embarked upon the happiest period of my entire life, a period which continues into the present. And the decline of physical powers consequent upon aging does not prevail against my sense of well-being. Looking back on the difficult crisis years, I ask myself: What was that all about?

"It may be enough to prompt the midlife crisis that you see in your future, at best, only more of the achievements and projects that make up your past." Exactly. That was the trigger for me, that and the action I took at 41.

Hired right out of graduate school at 28, I was awarded tenure at 34. Until tenure, life for an academic can be an emotional roller-coaster. It's up and down with the prospect of up or out, and if out, then most likely out for the count. Tenure brings a measure of peace. I settled in and enjoyed the job security. But then the worm began to gnaw. What now? More of the same? Will I spend the rest of my life in this boring midwest venue among these limited colleagues, decent people most of them, but academic functionaries more than real philosophers? Teaching intro and logic, logic and intro to the bored and boring? What starts out an exciting challenge can turn into a living death. It is truly awful to have to teach philosophy to a class of 35 only five of whom have a clue as to the purposes of a university and a scintilla of intellectual eros. It is like trying to feed the unhungry. (Cf. John Henry Cardinal Newman, The Idea of a University, a book overpaid administrators ought to be hit upside the head with and then forced to memorize.)

And then there was the rising tide of political correctness that in those days was only about half as bad as it has become. Why anyone with a conservative bent and a real love of the life of the mind would embark upon the quixotic quest for an academic post in the humanities in the current culturally Marxist climate is beyond me. You might get really lucky, find a job, and get tenure. But to what avail? You wanted to live the life of the mind in a university, not have to keep your mouth shut and your head down in a leftist seminary. No free man wants to spend his life in dissimulation.

Philosophy is different things to different people. For me it is a spiritual quest. Try to explain that to the average hyperprofessionalized and overspecialized academic hustler. The quest demands isolation from academic careerists and busybodies. It demands time for spiritual practices such as meditation. And so at age 41, having spent two years in a visiting associate professorship at a better school, I abandoned the tenured position at my home institution to live the life of the independent philosopher.

It was a bold move, foolish in the eyes of the world. "What about your career?" I was asked. The bold move triggered my midlife crisis and led me into the desert for a good long period of purgation. I have emerged from it a better man.

So if any of you are in the midst of a midlife crisis, view it as a sort of purgatory on earth. Perhaps you need to be purged of vain ambitions and unrealistic expectations. Make the most of it and you may emerge from it better than when you went in. Don't try to escape it by doing something rash like running off to Las Vegas with a floozie. Endure it and profit from it. If you must buy a motorcycle, do as a colleague of mine did: he rode it through his midlife crisis and then had the good sense to sell it.

Related: The Real Roots of Midlife Crisis. A good Atlantic article on happiness and the U-curve.

Hillary ‘Won’ Last Night’s Debate

I spent the whole day yesterday at an auto dealership buying my wife a new car. But last night I didn't dream about the car, but about Hillary who appeared young and stunning and topless, but with very small breasts. What does this dream mean?

My subconscious was telling me that Hillary came across in the first debate much better than Trump (young and stunning) and that therefore she 'won' the debate despite her indefensible position (toplessness) and weak arguments (small breasts).

And 'win' she did. She threw the Orange Man onto the defensive and made him look bad. Despite his allegations of her lack of stamina, she stood there strong as a bull. She threw a lot of bull too, but it doesn't matter in these so-called debates. It's all about appearances. That's what the world runs on. That's what impresses people. Remember Ronald Reagan's contentless 'zingers'? "There you go again!" "Where's the beef?" (An allusion to a Wendy's restaurant commercial of the time.)

Some of us recall Nixon-Kennedy, 1960. You could see Nixon sweat. Sweat and scowl. An introvert in an extrovert's profession, he was no match for the charming and charismatic and lovable Jack Kennedy. He lost on appearances. But Nixon was the better man with the better arguments despite playing Captain Ahab to Kennedy's Prince Charming.

Trump missed opportunities to nail Hillary. She spouted standard liberal nonsense about 'gun violence' as if guns are violent, but nary a peep escaped her lying lips about the thug culture in black ghettos which is the real root of the problem. Similarly on the 'stop and frisk' matter. But Trump was stymied by his need to appeal to black voters.

You can't say to black people that, as a group, they, and in particular young black males, are more criminally inclined than whites, and that this is what justifies 'stop and 'frisk' profiling, for they will take it as racist insult, not as the plain truth, which is what it is.

I predict a win by Hillary in the general, by a small margin. I hope I am wrong.

A Hillary win will concern me as a citizen. But as a philosopher it will be of no concern. For the owl of Minerva spreads its wings at dusk.

The theme unpacked: The Owl of Minerva Spreads its Wings at Dusk

Addendum 1. 'Gun epidemic' is another obfuscatory phrase Hillary used last night. A characteristic conflation of the moral and the epidemiological that could arise only in the febrile brain of a liberal. The problem in the black ghettos is not too many guns, but too few fathers.

Addendum 2. I said above that a Hillary win would concern me as a citizen but not as a philosopher. But this was an uncharacteristic undialectical lapse on my part. For one cannot flourish as a philosopher in prison or in a totalitarian regime. The embodied philosopher must concern himself to some extent with politics as with the material conditions of his philosophizing.

Corrigendum 1. Dennis M. writes,

A correction: “Where’s the beef?” was from a Reagan debate, but it was a line Mondale used against him. That one didn’t do much, but Reagan’s quip about not using Mondale’s youth and inexperience against him did a lot to kill the worries people had after his somewhat listless performance in their first debate.

I Used to be a Human Being

Andrew Sullivan recounts the perils of life in the information superhighway's fast lane.

But our man certainly is verbose. One would have thought that all that smartphone use and all that manic tweeting and updating would have induced a bit of pithiness into his writing.

I love the Internet and use it everyday except when I'm on retreat. But I have never sent a text message in my life; I do not have a Twitter account; my Facebook page languishes; I do not own a smartphone; my TracPhone account costs me a paltry $99 per year and I have thousands of unused minutes; I have a laptop and an ipad for backup but rarely use them; in the wild I use map and compass, never having bothered to buy a GPS device; I am never out and about with something stuck into my ear.

I know people who begin their day by checking text messages. You do what you want, but I say that's no way to live.

More Sage Advice in How Not to Begin the Day.

The Origins of Political Correctness

A YouTube video by William S. Lind with footage of Martin Jay, David Horowitz and Roger Kimball. Traces the origin of cultural Marxism from the breakdown of economic Marxism and the role of the Frankfurt School including discussion of the '60s New Left guru, Herbert Marcuse.

By the time I began as a freshman at Loyola University of Los Angeles in 1968, the old Thomism that had been taught out of scholastic manuals was long gone to be replaced by a hodge-podge of existentialism, phenomenology, and critical theory. The only analytic fellow in the department at the time was an adjunct with an M. A. from Glasgow. I pay tribute to him in In Praise of a Lowly Adjunct. The scholasticism taught by sleepy Jesuits before the ferment of the '60s was in many ways moribund, but at least it was systematic and presented a coherent worldview. The manuals, besides being systematic, also introduced the greats: Plato, Aristotle, Thomas, et al. By contrast, we were assigned stuff like Marcuse's Eros and Civilization. The abdication of authority on the part of Catholic universities has been going on for a long time.

See also by Lind, What is Cultural Marxism?

Juvenilia

I pulled out my scribblings from the summer of '66. Puerile stuff from a half-century ago. Painful in places. But earnest and sincere with a good line here and there. The old man honors the adolescent he was.

I wrote for posterity, though I didn't realize it at the time. And I still do. The posterity of self.

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Companion post: Why Keep a Journal?

It’s a Dry Heat

It's hot and dry in these parts this time of year, the candy-assed snowbirds have all flown back to their humid nests, and we desert rats like it plenty. That's why we live here. It takes a special breed of cat to be a desert rat.

You Californians stay put in your gun-grabbing, liberty-bashing, People's Republic of Political Correctness. Give my disregards to Governor Moonbeam. And that goes double for you effete and epicene residents of such Eastern states as the Commonwealth of Taxachusetts. Isn't that where Elizabeth 'Fauxcahontas' Warren spouts her nonsense?

Yesterday afternoon I was out and about in my Jeep Wrangler. The onboard thermometer reported the outside temperature as 116 degrees on the Fahrenheit scale.

Malcolm Pollack inquires, "Meanwhile, how do you manage in such heat? Do you just stay indoors? I suppose it's like living in Minneapolis in the winter."

It is no problem at all. We love the desert and deserts are typically hot in the summer. But there is often a 30 degree differential between the high and the low. 'Surely' it is better to live in a place where it is dry and hot in the afternoon but cool in the mornings rather in a flat and boring Eastern or Midwestern place where it is a humid 90 around the clock. Surely. (Might there be a bit of geographical chauvinism in play here?)

Do we just stay indoors? Of course not. This morning around 5:30 I hiked down to the swimming pool where I swam and did water aerobics for about an hour, chatting up the ladies and satisfying my social needs for the day. Then I went into the hot tub (sic!) for 15 minutes where I did stretching exercises. Then back into the pool for a cool-down, followed by a shower and a walk home. Other days I ride my mountain bike to the pool, swim, then go for a good ride while wet: with the soaked bandanna around my neck I'm as cool as a cucumber.

This afternoon I will go out around 3:30 to do some pro bono chess coaching at a local library for all comers, young and old. (I'm a strong coffee-house player; highest USCF rating in the 1700s.) Getting into a locked hot car that has been in the sun for an hour or two takes some getting used to, but one finds that steering a car requires less contact with the steering wheel than you might think.

From 1991 to 2009 I drove a 1988 Jeep Cherokee out here with no A.C. I'm not lying! I'm frugal. (Bought it in Ohio at T-giving in '87.) One summer I drove in one shot from Bishop, California in the High Sierra across the Mojave and Sonoran deserts to Phoenix. Stopping for gas in Blythe, California, just shy of the Colorado River and the Arizona border the temp. was 115. You drive open-windowed with an ice-cold wet bandanna around your neck. The only other motorists with their windows down were Mexicans. I felt a certain 'solidarity' with them. Does that make me a racist? Am I guilty of 'cultural appropriation'?

Tomorrow morning I pick up a guy at 5:30 and we head East into the desert for a little target practice, arriving at my favorite spot at 6. After expending 200-300 rounds between us, we head back around 8.

So no, we don't stay indoors.

I would say that Arizona is absolutely the best place to live year-round in the U.S. for all sorts of reasons.

There's a rattlesnake-infested wilderness right outside my door. Up for a hike? We leave in the dark, commence hiking at first light, and are done around ten A. M.

Risks of Desert Hiking

On Roasting Oneself: The Five Ways

Mirabile Dictu: Irish Reader Finds New Yorkers Civil and Friendly

London Karl, an Irish resident of London, checks in with this update:

I'm just back from my first ever trip to America. Only New York, which I am reliably informed is representative of nothing other than itself, but I was touched and impressed by the civility and friendliness I encountered. People there are way friendlier than the Brits. You may despair over your country, but you have that at least!

This is funny. New Yorkers are generally regarded as rude and obnoxious. Donald Trump, for example, is a New Yorker, as is Brian Leiter. No, I am not hastily generalizing from two examples, I am illustrating with two examples an antecedently established general proposition.

It is too bad that London Karl did not have the time or the wherewithal to travel deep into Real America where he would have found much better examples of civility and friendliness.

Some years back I read a paper at Tulane University in New Orleans. Wandering around one afternoon on my own, not in the French Quarter, but in some rather nondescript part of town, I walked into a restaurant for lunch. There I was greeted by a woman who displayed a level of hospitality and friendliness and warmth I had never encountered before. This, I thought to myself, is what must be meant by Southern hospitality. There was, of course, a commercial motivation behind the display; but it was also deeply genuine. That was back in '87 and I have never forgotten the experience.

During that same trip, however, I ran into chess master Jude Acers in the French Quarter. Stationed on the street in his red beret, he plays (or played) all comers at $5 a game. Nothing particularly civil or friendly about him, rather the opposite. But then he is a chess player, one, and not from the South, two. After five games, I paid him his $25 and he made sure that I understood that he had played me for a chump and 'taken me' for 25 semolians. Me, I was happy to part with the money for chess lessons on Bourbon Street in the romantic city of the great Paul Morphy.

He said one thing that has stuck with me. Near the end of a game, he pointed to one of his pawns which had an unobstructed path to the queening square. I couldn't stop it, but it still had a long way to go. He announced, "This pawn has already queened."

A deeply Platonic comment. A timeless use of 'already.' Sub specie aeternitatis, the pawn had queened, or rather IS (timelessly) queened.

"Before Abraham was, I am." (John 8:58)

UPDATE. London Karl responds:

Trust me, I had the desire and the wherewithal to go into the real America; I just didn't have the time. I preferred the edgy friendliness of the New Yorkers to the passive aggression that passes for English 'politeness'.

The Wages of Political Correctness: A Climate of Fear

William Burroughs, London Ed, Patrick Kurp, and Literary Trash

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Celebrating Freedom and Independence

Do Purely Fictional Items Exist? On Van Inwagen's Theory of Ficta

Not Dark Yet: Bob Dylan Turns 75 Today

25 things you might want to know know about Dylan. Excellent, except for the introductory claim that he is "rock's greatest songwriter." A better description is "America's greatest writer of popular songs." Bar none. We can discuss the criteria later, and consider counterexamples. Maybe this Saturday night. His earliest four or five albums are not in the rock genre. I'll permit quibbling about #5, Bringing It All Back Home (1965), but Bob Dylan (1962), The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan (1963) , The Time's They Are A'Changin' (1964), and Another Side of Bob Dylan (1964) are better classified as folk, not that they sit all that comfortably in this niche.

These early albums are studded with lasting contributions to Americana. This is music with meaning that speaks to the mind and the heart. No Rat Pack crooner Las Vegas lounge lizard stuff here.Two lesser-known compositions both from The Times They Are a'Changin':

The Ballad of Hollis Brown Performed by Stephen Stills.

North Country Blues. Written from the point of view of a woman and so appropriately sung by the angel-throated Joan Baez.

D. A. Pennebaker on the making of Don't Look Back. I saw it in '67 when it first came out. I just had to see it, just as I had to have all of Dylan's albums, all of his sheet music, and every article and book about him. I was a Dylan fanatic. No longer a fanatic, I remain a fan.

May he die with his boots on. It ain't dark yet, but it's gettin' there.

A Red-Diaper Baby I Once Knew: Anecdotes Illustrating Leftist Illusions

In graduate school I was friends for a time with a New York Jew who for the purposes of this memoir I will refer to as 'Saul Peckstein.' A red diaper baby, he was brought up on Communism the way I was brought up on Roman Catholicism. Invited up to his room one day, I was taken aback by three huge posters on his wall, of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin.

There is a distinctive quality of personal warmth that many Jews display, the quality conveyed when we say of so-and-so that he or she is a mensch. It is a sort of humanity, hard to describe, in my experience not as prevalent among goyim. Peckstein had it. But he was nonetheless able to live comfortably under the gaze of a mass murderer and their philosophical progenitors.

One day we were walking across campus when he said to me, "Don't you think we could run this place?" He was venting the utopian dream of a classless society, a locus classicus of which is a famous passage from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology (ed. C. J. Arthur, New York: International Publishers, 1970, p. 53):

. . . as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a shepherd, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.

The silly utopianism seeps out of "each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes." Could Saul Kripke have become a diplomat or a chauffeur or an auto mechanic if he wished? Pee Wee Herman a furniture mover or Pope? Woody Allen a bronco buster? Evel Knievel a neurosurgeon? And if Marx has actually done any 'cattle rearing,' he would have soon discovered that he couldn't be successful at it if he did it once in a while when he wasn't in the mood for hunting, fishing, or writing Das Kapital.

On another occasion Peckstein asked, "After the Revolution, what will we do with all the churches?" Like so many other commies he cherished the naive expectation that 'the revolution is right around the corner' in a phrase much bandied-about in CPUSA circles. And in tandem with that naivete, the foolish notion that religion would just wither away when material wants were satisfied and social oppression eliminated, a notion that betrays the deep superficiality of the materialist vision of man and his world.

One night we ate at an expensive restaurant, Anthony's Pier Four at the Boston harbor. Peckstein paid with a bad check. After all, it was an 'exploitative' capitalist enterprise and the owners deserved to be stiffed. But he left a substantial tip in cash for the servers. As I said, he was a mensch.

A few of us graduate students had been meeting to discuss Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. One day I announced that the topic for the next meeting would be the Table of Categories. Peckstein quipped, "Is that table you can eat on?" The materialist crudity of the remark annoyed me.

And then there was the time he wondered why people thank God before a meal rather than the farmers.

We were friends for a time, but friendship is fragile among those for whom ideas matter. Unlike the ordinary non-intellectual person, the intellectual lives for and sometimes from ideas. They are his oxygen and sometimes his bread and butter. He takes them very seriously indeed and with them differences in ideas. So the tendency is for one intellectual to view an ideologically divergent other intellectual as not merely holding incorrect views but as being morally defective in so doing.

Why? Because ideas matter to the intellectual. They matter in the way doctrines and dogmas mattered to old-time religionists. If one's eternal happiness is at stake, it matters infinitely whether one 'gets it right' doctrinally. If there is no salvation outside the church, you'd better belong to the right church. It matters so much that one may feel entirely justified in forcing the heterodox to recant 'for their own good.'

The typical intellectual nowadays is a secularist who believes in nothing that transcends the human horizon. But he takes into his secularism that old-time fervor, that old-time zeal to suppress dissent and punish apostates. It is called political correctness.

And as you have heard me say more than once: P.C. comes from the C. P.

The Differences Between Me and You

I'm sensitive, you're touchy. I'm firm, you are pigheaded. Frugality in me is cheapness in you. I am open-minded, you are empty-headed. I am careful, you are obsessive. I am courageous while you are as reckless as a Kennedy. I am polite but you are obsequious. My speech is soothing, yours is unctuous. I am earthy and brimming with vitality while you are crude and bestial. I'm alive to necessary distinctions; you are a bloody hairsplitter. I'm conservative, you're reactionary. I know the human heart, but you are a misanthrope. I love and honor my wife while you are uxorious. I am focused; you are monomaniacal.

In me there is commitment, in you fanaticism. I'm a peacemaker, you're an appeaser. I'm spontaneous, you're just undisciplined. I'm neat and clean; you are fastidious. In me there is wit and style, in you mere preciosity. I know the value of a dollar while you are just a miser. I cross the Rubicons of life with resoluteness while you are a fool who burns his bridges behind him. I do not hide my masculinity, but you flaunt yours. I save, you hoard. I am reserved, you are shy. I invest, you gamble. I am a lover of solitude, you are a recluse.

I have a hearty appetite; you are a glutton. A civilized man, I enjoy an occasional drink; you, however, must teetotal to avoid becoming a drunkard. I'm witty and urbane, you are precious. I am bucolic, you are rustic. I'm original, you are idiosyncratic. I am principled, you are doctrinaire. I am precise, you are pedantic.

And those are just some of the differences between me and you.

My One Claim to Chess Fame: The ‘Famous’ Vallicella Trap in the Caro-Kann

What follows are two posts written by Dennis Monokroussos from his first-rate chess weblog, The Chess Mind. For purposes of comparison, here are the United States Chess Federation ratings of four, actually five, chess playing philosopher friends. For detailed stats click on the names. Dennis Monokroussos: 2385. Timothy McGrew: 2196. Victor Reppert: 1912. Ed Yetman: 1800. Bill Vallicella: 1543. (My highest rating was 1726)

Part of my point is that life is unfair. Why should I have a trap named after me, when nothing chessic is named after my above-listed philosophizing chess betters? Perhaps it shows that even a patzer can have a good idea now and again. Why should I get to join Franz Brentano in the annals of chess? (The Brentano Defense in the Ruy Lopez is named after him: 1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. Bb5 g5)

Am I comparing myself to Brentano? Well, yes: anything can be compared to anything.

If anyone has any idea as to Brentano's playing strength, shoot me an e-mail.

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The Famous Vallicella Trap?! (posted 8 May 2008)

I was browsing IM Jovanka Houska's 2007 book Play the Caro-Kann, and while looking through the introductory section on the Panov/Botvinnik Attack I read something incredible. In a subsection called 7th move sidelines, I came across this:

1 e4 c6 2 d4 d5 3 exd5 cxd5 4 c4 Nf6 5 Nc3

5 Nf3 is known as Vallicella's Caro-Kann trap – Black has to watch out for one big trick. Best is simply to play 5…Nc6, transposing to the main line after 6 Nc3, but 5…Bg4? would be a mistake after 6 c5! Nc6 7 Bb5. The point is that Black has big difficulties defending the c6 point; for example, 7…e6 8 Qa4 Qc7 9 Ne5 Rc8 10 Bf4 and White is winning! [p. 76]

There's nothing objectionable about the analysis*; rather, what struck me was the reference to Vallicella's Caro-Kann trap, as if this was standard lore in treatments of the Caro-Kann. How did Bill Vallicella, an outstanding philosophical blogger but a 1500-1700 club player not engaged in publicizing his games, suddenly achieve such fame? I had come across his trap either from an email by him or on a post on his predominantly philosophical blog, but when did a move he may have played but a single time turn into an idea requiring mention in a pretty major new theoretical work?

Houska doesn't cite a source, and I certainly didn't recall seeing it in any published materials, so naturally it was off to Google. Entering "Vallicella Caro-Kann", I discovered the main source, conveniently entitled "Vallicella's Caro-Kann Trap"…and you can, too – just click here. Then laugh.**

* Actually, while I wouldn't disagree with her positive suggestion, I don't believe 5…Bg4 is in fact a mistake; the real error comes later. After, e.g. 7…e5 I don't see a White advantage after 8.dxe5 Ne4 or 8.Qa4 Bxf3 9.Bxc6+ bxc6 10.Qxc6+ Nd7 11.gxf3 exd4, and even the arguably best 8.Nc3 promises little or nothing after 8…Nd7 9.dxe5 Bxf3 (10.Qxf3 d4; 10.gxf3 a6).

** If anyone knows IM Houska personally, please ask her to write me – I'd like to trace the path from Vallicella's idea to her book.

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Vallicella's Caro-Kann Trap (posted 27 August 2005)

After 1.e4 c6 2.d4 d5 3.exd5 cxd5 4.c4 Nf6, the usual follow-up is 5.Nc3, when Black has three standard replies:

(A) 5…e6, when White plays 6.Nf3,
(B) 5…g6, when White plays 6.Qb3, and
(C) 5…Nc6, when White can either accede to the pin after 6.Nf3 Bg4, or else play the sharper but less reliable 6.Bg5.

Instead, the Maverick Philosopher has been utilizing the tricky 5.Nf3. It looks slightly clumsy, welcoming the Black bishop to g4 right away, but his idea is revealed after 5…Bg4 6.c5 Nc6 7.Bb5 e6 8.Qa4 Qc7 9.Ne5 Rc8 10.Bf4, when between the pin on c6, the threat of various discoveries involving the Bf4/Ne5/Qc7, and other, lesser but still significant problems with the Black position, White is winning.

Where did Black go wrong? I've already addressed this to some extent in a post on my previous blog, but as the move order examined there was a bit different than what we find in this game, I'll offer some new comments.

First, on move 5, Black can respond with the three normal anti-5.Nc3 options: 5…e6, 5…Nc6, and 5…g6. Should he do so, I don't see any advantage to be had by 5.Nf3, and there is a possible disadvantage. After 5.Nc3 g6, White's best try for an advantage is 6.cxd5 Bg7 7.Qb3 O-O 8.Be2 Nbd7 9.Bf3 Nb6 10.Nge2, but this variation is obviously impossible once White has placed the knight on f3. After 5.Nf3 g6 6.Nc3 Bg7 7.cxd5 O-O 8.Bc4 Nbd7 9.O-O Nb6 10.Bb3 both 10…Nbxd5 and 10…Nfxd5 have scored very well for Black.

Second, after 5.Nf3 Bg4 6.c5 Nc6 7.Bb5, the confrontational 7…e5 seems to give Black equal chances after 8.dxe5 Ne4 9.b4 Be7 10.O-O O-O 11.Bxc6 bxc6 12.Qd3 a5 13.Nd4 Bd7.

Third, as mentioned in my earlier blog post (linked above), after 7…e6 8.Qa4, the pawn sac 8…Bxf3 9.Bxc6+ bxc6 10.Qxc6+ Nd7 11.gxf3 leaves Black some compensation for the pawn in the form of White's numerous pawn weaknesses and the lack of an obvious refuge for the White king.

In sum, I think 5.Nf3 is objectively inferior to 5.Nc3. However, it doesn't seem that much weaker, and it does come with a nice positional trap, making it a reasonable surprise weapon for the odd game.

The variations above, and a bit more, can be replayed here.

The Dignity of Labor and Marxist Utopianism

This old man busted his hump for a solid three hours this morning shoveling a ton and a half of 3/4" Madison gold landscaping rock onto his property. I paid $91 for the rock and $45 to have it delivered. Here in the Sonoran desert water-wasting lawns are frowned upon; xeriscapes are de rigueur. The existing rock was wearing thin. Since I keep myself in shape with weight-lifting and such, I was up for the job, though by 10 AM with Old Sol beating done mercilessly I was righteously fagged out and ready for the old man nap. Since I arise at two ante meridian, by ten I have already put in an eight hour day.

Physical work is good for the soul if you are working for yourself and have time for other things. So I have long felt a certain sympathy for a famous passage from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology (ed. C. J. Arthur, New York: International Publishers, 1970, p. 53):

. . . as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a shepherd, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.

With all due respect to Dennis Prager, Marx did not envisage a society in which people do no work, but one in which their work was non-alienating and fulfilling. If you have ever worked a factory job where you are required to perform a mindless repetitive task for low wages for eight or more hours per day, then you should be able to sympathize somewhat with Marx. But the sympathy is not likely to survive a clear recognition of the absurdity of what Marx is proposing above.

First of all, it is is silly to say that "each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes." Could Saul Kripke have become a diplomat or a chauffeur or an auto mechanic if he wished? PeeWee Herman a furniture mover or Pope? Einstein a general? Patton a physicist? Woody Allen a bronco-buster? Evel Knievel a neurosurgeon? And if Marx had actually done any 'cattle rearing,' he would have soon discovered that he couldn't be successful at it if he did it once in a while when he wasn't in the mood for hunting, fishing, or writing Das Kapital.

So despite my sympathy, I judge that what we have above is utopian, reality-denying nonsense. Dangerous, murderous, leftist nonsense. Incoherence: dictatorship of the proletariat, classless society, worker's paradise. Cuba? North Korea? Communist China? Dictatorship of the dictator (Stalin, Mao, Fidel . . .). Classlessness by reduction of the people to one class, that of the impoverished and oppressed, lorded over by apparatchiks vastly UNEQUAL in power, perquisites, and pelf to those they lord over. So in the end two classes: oppressed and oppressors.

The incoherence of socialism in a nutshell: The achievement of the desired-for equality requires the suppression of dissidents and the the inequality of the revolutionary vanguard who, once enjoying a taste of their unequal power, will never give it up, until the whole house of cards collapses as did the USSR.

But this leaves us with the problem of the millions of Americans who work repetitive, boring jobs for lousy pay. One thing that could be done that would drive up the pay scale is something that RINOs and liberals refuse to do, namely, stop the influx of illegal aliens. RINOs want cheap labor while the liberal scum want to alter the demographics of the nation in such a way as to assure the permanent ascendancy of the Left. These two unsavory groups are in tacit cahoots. To hell with them both.

So here you may have a reason to support Trump, as awful as he is.

Two Recent Publications of Mine

"Van Inwagen on Fiction, Existence, Properties, Particulars, and Method," Studia Neoaristotelica: A Journal of Analytical Scholasticism, vol, 12, no. 2 (2015), pp. 99-125. This is a long review article on Peter van Inwagen's Existence: Essays in Ontology, Cambridge University Press, 2014.

"Facts: An Essay in Aporetics" in Francesco F. Calemi, ed., Metaphysics and Scientific Realism: Essays in Honour of David Malet Armstrong, Walter de Gruyter, 2016, pp. 105-131.

This volume also includes contributions by Matthew Tugby, Francesco F. Calemi, Peter van Inwagen, Peter Simons, Anna-Sofia Maurin, Javier Cumpa, Kristie Miller, Stephen Mumford, Andrea Borghini, Michele Paolini Paoletti, Tuomas E. Tahko, D. H. Mellor, Francesco Orilia, and Paolo Valore.

Bad Teachers and Lousy Colleagues: The Upside

If I had had outstanding teachers, perhaps I would not have been able to gain and sustain the self-confidence that saw me through. And if not for lousy colleagues I might not have been hired when I was pretty lousy too.