Category: Blogging

Welcome to Maverick Philosopher

My name is William F. Vallicella, I have the doctorate in philosophy (Boston College, 1978), and I have published a couple of books and 70 or so articles in the professional journals. A confirmed blogger in the grip of cacoethes scribendi, I’ve been online since May 2004 on various platforms.  This is MavPhil Gen IV.  I publish online here, at Substack, on Facebook, and at X.  I began posting at Substack in early 2021 under the rubric “Philosophy in Progress.” The Substack entries are intended to assist educated non-philosophers in clarifying their thinking about matters of moment.  My PhilPeople page links to my Substack articles and provides a list of my professional publications. 

Two-line biography:  I taught philosophy at various universities in the USA and abroad. At the relatively young age of 41 I resigned from  a tenured position to live the eremitic life of the independent philosopher in the Sonoran desert. 

Interests: Everything. Homo sum: humani nihil a me alienum puto. (Terentius) “I am a man: I consider nothing human foreign to me.” 

Motto: “Study everything, join nothing.” (Paul Brunton)

Comment Policy: This site is not a discussion board.  Comments must address directly what the author says or what the commenters say.  Other comments will not be allowed to appear. Comments should be pithy and to the point. In these hyperkinetic times, the regnant abbreviation is TL;DR.  If you are a cyberpunk needing to take a data dump, please relieve yourself elsewhere.

My politics?  From Democrat to Dissident

Political Burden of Proof: As contemporary ‘liberals’ become ever more extreme, they increasingly assume what I will call the political burden of proof. The onus is now on them to defeat the presumption that they are so morally and intellectually obtuse as not to be worth talking to.

Much more below the fold. Best wishes to all men and women of good will who love truth, seek it, and strive to incorporate it in their lives.

 

Continue reading “Welcome to Maverick Philosopher“

New Search Engine: Duck Duck Go

While on 'ego surfari' I came upon this page.  What a wonderful time to be alive, despite the general horrors of existence, not to mention those particular to our time and place and individual circumstances.  See the Whole from many sides.  There is much more to it than your foreshortened persepctives allow.  Don't obsess over the those crushed in Haitian and Chilean earthquakes when there is also bliss and beauty and beatitude in the world.  If you decry the shit, don't ignore the beautiful roses it fertilizes. 

As for the ego, it is ugly and odious  — Le moi est haïssable said Pascal famously and pensively — but that is only its night side: ego betokens spirit in us.  Only a spiritual being can say 'I' and mean it.  An answering machine can say it but not mean it.  Only an I can recognize and love a Thou and stand master of the universe in thought.  An ambiguous structure, the ego is a principle of  both alienation and union.

Site Stats

Today this site received 1,687 page views.  That may be a new high.  I thank you all for your patronage.  Read or unread, I write on.  But it is better to be read.  And knowing that there are very intelligent readers out there keeps me honest and makes me work harder.

Of Blood and Blog

I don't think my experience is unusual: our blood relatives tend not to give a hoot about our blogging activities. They say blood is thicker than water, but consanguinity  sure doesn't seem to translate into  spiritual affinity. No matter, the community that we can't find by blood, we'll find by blog.

The people who know us take us for granted. Is it not written that "no prophet is welcome in his hometown"? (Luke 4, 24: nemo propheta acceptus est in patria sua.)

One could call it the injustice of propinquity. We often underestimate those nearby, whether by blood or space, while overestimating those afar.

Powerblogs Finally Pulls the Plug; TypePad Rules!

It happened around 5 PM local time, yesterday, January 3rd.  It was supposed to happen on the last day of November.  One final bit of incompetence from the Powerblogs team: it took them over a month to shut down their server.   But I used the time to capture more old posts the easy way.  Yes, of course, I have backed up the entire site, comments and all.  (Keith Burgess-Jackson kindly gave me unsolicited advice on how to do this.) I have also backed up the hundreds of partially completed draft posts.  Trouble is, it is a royal pain in the culo to transfer the backed-up material to the archive site.  I have done a little, as you can see here.  But it is an awful chore working with a monstrously large blob of unstructured text, cutting it at the joints.  It's work not fit for man nor beast. My life of creative leisure under the guiding star of otium liberale has spoiled me for mechanical and secretarial tasks.  Being a vox clamantis in deserto doesn't help either.

Continue reading “Powerblogs Finally Pulls the Plug; TypePad Rules!”

BlogWatch: Anecdotal Evidence

From the masthead: A blog about the intersection of books and life.  By Patrick Kurp, Bellevue, Washington.  Excerpt from a recent post:

I’m reading more than at almost any time in my life but spending less time reading online. The two facts have a common source – a festering impatience with shoddy writing. My literary gut, when young, was goat-like — tough and indiscriminate. I read everything remotely of interest and felt compelled to finish every book I started. This makes sense: Everything was new, and how could I knowledgeably sift wheat from chaff without first milling, baking and ingesting? Literary prejudice, in a healthy reader, intensifies with age. I know and trust my tastes, and no longer need to read William Burroughs to figure out he wrote sadistic trash.

I've read my fair share of Burroughs and I concur that his stuff is trash: Junkie, Naked Lunch, The Soft Machine, Exterminator.  All in my library.  But there is a place for literary trash.  It has its uses as do the pathologist's  slides and samples.  But put on your mental gloves before handling the stuff. 

You’re So Vain, You Prob’ly Think This Post is About You

But it isn't! Permit me to explain.

If You Send E-Mail to a Blogger . . .

. . . bear in mind that it is liable to be posted for all the world to see.  Most bloggers are permanently on the prowl for interesting 'blog fodder.'  This blogger is no different.  What I find interesting, what I find suits my philosophical or pedagogical or polemical purposes, is liable to be posted in whole or in part.  Of course, I am typically discreet and reasonable by my lights.  But what counts as discretion and reasonableness by my lights may not count as such by yours.  So if you send me something and want to be sure it doesn't enter the 'sphere, append some such annotation as:  Not for public consumption.  I will respect your wishes if you are a decent and honorable person. 

I used to supply the names and sometimes the e-mail addresses of correspondents who submitted material, but in many cases I no longer do this, both to protect the young and not-yet-established who are trying to make their way in a world increasingly polarized and dirempted by political antagonisms, a world in which almost anyone can find out almost anything about almost anyone with a few keystrokes, but also to save myself work later on when said individuals, out of a fear that is often excessive, ask me to remove their names and other identifying information.

Own your words.  Accept responsibility for what you say and do.  Don't hide behind handles.  These are sound conservative maxims.  I will enforce them on some, but I cannot in good conscience enforce them on all in the present social and political climate.  The years to come will be interesting indeed, as things 'heat up' ever more.  And I am not talking about global warming.

Mangan’s Blog Has Been Removed

If you try to access Dennis Mangan's weblog you receive the message: Sorry, the blog at mangans.blogspot.com has been removed.  (HT: Malcolm Pollack)  If you were to ask me to speculate I would say that the forces of political correctness have something to do with this.  I quit using the Blogger/Blogspot platform almost six year ago, and I don't understand why people stick with it, apart from the fact that it is free.  Note the link to "report abuse" and "objectionable content" at the top of the Blogger homepage.  You can bet that idiots in great numbers will abuse this link, idiots who do not appreciate the good old classically liberal values of toleration, open inquiry, and free speech.

For more discussion of the Mangan case, see Malcolm Pollack's post Thoughtcrime, and a post by Laurence Auster. 

UPDATE (5:15 PM):  Mangan informs me that he is back in the saddle, here, at Typepad.

UPDATE (4 December):  I see that Mangan's old blog has been restored by the powers that be.  Interestingly, if you Google 'Mangan's' you are shown a link to his Racial Consciousness.  It  is but speculation on my part, but I should think that it is posts like this that certain people find objectionable, and that got him blacked out,  if only temporarily.

Go read the post and ask yourself if there is anything in it that a reasonable person could find 'hateful' or 'racist' or sufficiently objectionable to warrant censure.  If you answer in the affirmative, then you brand yourself as hopelessly obtuse, both morally and intellectually.

Malcolm Pollack at the Gates of Vienna

Or rather, at the gates of Gotham.  Malcolm writes,

Upon reading your post The Left's Death Wish, I thought you might find this interesting: A Genealogy of Radical Islam.

I've been contending with the liberal mindset regarding Islam over at my own place, where, for suggesting that the massacre at Ft. Hood was most likely an example of jihad, and of why an increasing Muslim presence in the West might not be such a good idea, I was tarred, as usual, as a vile Islamophobe.

It's often tempting, as my own shadow lengthens to the East, to withdraw to a quiet life of reading and contemplation. But scribble I must, it seems.

1. Well, Malcolm, I hope you don't succumb to the temptation to withdraw from the fray.  To paraphrase Plato, the price the good pay for their indifference to politics is to be ruled by the evil.  Not that I don't understand the temptation to withdraw.  To quote from an earlier post: 

Why not stick to one's stoa and cultivate one's specialist garden in peace and quiet, neither involving oneself in, nor forming opinions about, the wider world of politics and strife? Why risk one's ataraxia in the noxious arena of contention? Why not remain within the serene precincts of theoria? For those of us of a certain age the chances are good that death will arrive before the barbarians do.

[. . .]

 The answer is that the gardens of tranquillity and the spaces of reason are worth defending, with blood and iron if need be, against the barbarians and their leftist enablers. Others have fought and bled so that we can live this life of solitude and beatitude. And so though we are not warriors of the body, we can and should do our tiny bit as warriors of the mind to preserve for future generations this culture which allows us to pursue otium liberale in peace, quiet, and safety.

2.  I don't know whether to commend you or criticize you for the restraint and tolerance you have shown in the comment thread to your 11/5 post.  One of the cyberpunks  calls you a "xenophobe" while the other removes the 'crypto' from your ironic self-characterization as a "crypto-Nazi."  Me, I DELETE and BLOCK the minute that sort of behavior is manifested.  Why waste your time with abusive cyberpunks who hide anonymously behind their 'handles' while spewing their PeeCee nonsense? 

The answer, I suppose, is that by responding you demonstrate to others, if not to the punks, how to rebut the charges.  So perhaps I should commend you for your toleration.  I suspect you will agree with me, however, that toleration has its limits.

3.  We agree on the substantive point that, as you put it " the massacre at Ft. Hood was most likely an example of jihad. . . ."  There is plenty of evidence for this, and it is most disconcerting that so many, blinded by their political correctness and moral cowardice cannot see it.

Blog on!

Three Friends

The blogosphere has been good to me, having brought me a number of friends, some of whom I have met face to face.  For now I will mention just three. 

Having read my announcement that PowerBlogs will be shutting down at the end of November, Keith Burgess-Jackson kindly sent me a number of unsolicited e-mails explaining how I could import the  PowerBlogs posts, together with comments, en masse into this Typepad site.  I had forgotten that the Typepad platform allows for multiple blogs.  Keith's idea was simply to set up an archival blog and dump the old posts there.  As usual, the devil is in the details.  But a  careful perusal of his-emails gave me all the clues I needed to get this project underway.  Eventually, I will install a link to the PowerBlogs archive on my front page.

Keith is one my oldest blogospheric friends. We met early in 2004 not long after I had entered the 'sphere.  He has been more than kind in promoting my efforts over the years.  I fear that I have not reciprocated sufficiently.  So I want you to go to his site right now and read his current batch of offerings.  I should also mention that if it weren't for Keith I would never have met philosopher Mike Valle who lives a few miles from here. 

I can't recall how exactly I met Ed Feser; it may have been via Keith's old Conservative Philosopher group blog.  In any case, we have had a number of invigorating discussions.  We have our differences, but our common ground makes their exfoliation fruitful.  I am presently gearing up for another round as I study his latest book, Aquinas: A Beginner's Guide (One World, 2009), an inscribed copy of which he kindly sent me.  Ed chimes in on his blog in agreement with my recent rant about copy editors and their political correctness.  Please check it out.

Last but not least, Peter Lupu, who, though not a blogger, is the Real Thing as philosophers go.  Such birds are rarely sighted even within (especially within?) the academic aviary.  He discovered me via the old PowerBlogs site and left the best comments there that I have received in five years of blogging.  To my great good fortune he flourishes here in the Zone and we see each other regularly. Last Thursday he came by and we talked from 2 to 9 P.M.  He would have gone on til midnight had I let him.  I have met in my entire life only one other philosopher with whom I could have as deep and productive a discussion, and that is my old friend Quentin Smith who I met in my early twenties.  Like Smith an avis rara, Lupu has become the Smith of my late middle age.

So the blogosphere has been good to me.  Today's stats hit an all-time high of 1,212 page views.  I have nothing to complain about.  Thanks for reading.

Note to Long-Time Readers

I have just learned that PowerBlogs will shut down permanently on 30 November 2009.  Those of you who left comments at the old blog and who wish to copy them are advised to do so by the end of November.  Between now and then you may expect a flurry of reposting at this site as I bring over the posts that I consider worth preserving.  Quite a number have already been transferred, but, scribbler that I am, there remains an astonishing number left to revise and repost.