Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Logica Utens

  • Marriage, the State, and Slippery Slope Arguments: An Objection Considered

    A Reader Objects "First, if your justification of state involvement in marriage is the production and protection of children, then I think you open yourself to intervention of the state beyond what a limited government conservative should be comfortable with. If protection of marriage by the state for such a goal is the standard, many…

  • Logic, Hypocrisy, and Tobacco-Wackery

    Ruth Marcus begins her piece, The Perils of Legalized Marijuana, as follows: Marijuana legalization may be the same-sex marriage of 2014 — a trend that reveals itself in the course of the year as obvious and inexorable. At the risk of exposing myself as the fuddy-duddy I seem to have become, I hope not. This…

  • Arguments, Testicles, and Inside Knowledge

    T. L. e-mails, Here’s fodder for a follow-up MP post, if you care to pursue it. I do not endorse the following objection, but I wonder how you’d reply. In “David Lewis on Religion” you say: "To be a good philosopher of X one ought to know both philosophy and X from the inside, by…

  • Camille Paglia on Philosophy and Women in Philosophy

    Here: The term "female philosopher" doesn't even make sense to me. Simone de Beauvoir was a thinker rather than a philosopher. A philosopher for me is someone who is removed from everyday concerns and manipulates terms and concepts like counters on a grid or chessboard. Both Simone de Beauvoir and Ayn Rand, another favourite of…

  • Financial Advice: Short Form and Long Form

    Source.  Excellent advice, except for the last item.  But the advice is incomplete.  For a rather more complete analysis, see Some Principles of a Financial Conservative wherein I proffer advice that is rock-solid, absolutely free, and that also has the interesting property that few will follow it due to the social and moral decline of…

  • On the Misuse of Superlatives (the Brokaw Fallacy) and Two Other Fallacies

    Adjectives admit of three degrees of comparison: positive, comparative, and superlative.  The first refers to the zero case of comparison: Tom is tall.  The second refers to a situation in which two things are compared: Tom is taller than Tim.  The third refers to a situation in which a thing is compared to all the…

  • On Criticizing Something for Being What It Is

    If a person or institution is essentially F, then to criticize it for being F  is equivalent to criticizing it for existing.  (If x is essentially F, then x cannot exist without being F.  If x is F, but not essentially, then x is accidentally F: capable of existing without being F.)  Let's test this…

  • Liberals and Straw Men

    Here is a particularly egregious example of a liberal straw man argument.  In a New Yorker piece, Margaret Talbot writes: As a nation, we’re a little vague on what the Second Amendment’s protections of  a citizen militia mean for gun ownership today. The N.R.A. insists that they  mean virtually unlimited access to firearms for every…

  • Nick Gillespie on Why Youth Favor Obama and Conservatism’s Contradictions

    Support for Obama among 18-29 year olds exceeds that of any other age cohort.  Reason Magazine's Nick Gillespie argues that Obama is in the process of "screwing them big time."  Gillespie is right.   What caught my eye, however, was Gillespie's  explanation of why conservatives fail to get the youth vote: I'd argue that what makes "the conservative message"  resonate less…

  • On the Obvious

    As Hilary Putnam once said, "It ain't obvious what's obvious." Or as I like to say, "One man's datum is another man's theory." But is it obvious that it ain't obvious what's obvious?  It looks as if we have a little self-referential puzzle going here.  Does the Hilarian dictum apply to itself?  An absence of…

  • Leftist First, Catholic Second

    For too many Catholics and other Christians, their leftism is their real 'religion.'  This from The Thinking Housewife: ANNY YENNY reports at the website Politichicks that her eighth-grade son was given extra credit by his Catholic school religion teacher for fasting on the first day of Ramadan. When the mother complained, the teacher objected and…

  • A Survey of Responses to the Three-In-One Paradox

    Philosophers love a paradox, but hate a contradiction. Paradoxes drive inquiry while contradictions stop it dead in its tracks. The doctrine of the Trinity is a paradox threatening to collapse into one  or more contradictions. Put starkly, and abstracting from the complexity of the creedal formulations, the doctrine says that God is one, and yet…

  • The Logical Problem of the Trinity

    Our question concerns the logical consistency of the following septad, each limb of which is a commitment of orthodoxy.  See here for details.  How can the following propositions all be true? 1. There is only one God.2. The Father is God.3. The Son is God.4. The Holy Spirit is God.5. The Father is not the…

  • The Stove ‘Dilemma’ and the Lewis ‘Trilemma’

    This from R. J. Stove, son of atheist and neo-positivist, David Stove: When the possibility of converting to Catholicism became a real one, it was the immensity of the whole package that daunted me, rather than specific teachings. I therefore spent little time agonizing over the Assumption of Mary, justification by works as well as…

  • “Environmentalists are by Definition Extremists” More on the Misuse of ‘By Definition’

    Regular readers of this blog know that I respect and admire Dennis Prager: he is a font of wisdom and a source of insight.  And he is a real Mensch to boot. (If I were a Jew and he a rabbi, he'd be my choice.) But I just heard him say, "Environmentalists are by definition extremists." …