Metaphilosophy – Page 15 – Maverick Philosopher

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 the particular quantifier may be read as a tacit endorsement of the universal quantifier. Now if it is never obvious what is obvious, then we have self-reference and the Hilarian dictum by its own say-so is not obvious.

Is there a logical problem here? I don't think so. With no breach of logical consistency one can maintain that it is never obvious what is obvious, as long as one does not exempt one's very thesis. In this case the self-referentiality issues not in self-refutation but in self-vitiation. The Hilarian dictum is a self-weakening thesis. Over the years I have given many examples of this. (But I am now too lazy to dig them out of my vast archives.)

There is no logical problem, but there is a factual problem. Surely some propositions are obviously true. Having toked on a good cigar in its end game, when a cigar is at its most nasty and rasty, I am am feeling mighty fine long about now. My feeling of elation, just as such, taken in its phenomenological quiddity, under epoche of all transcendent positings — this quale is obvious if anything is.

So let us modify the Hilarian dictum to bring it in line with the truth.

In philosophy, appeals to what is obvious, or self-evident, or plain to gesundes Menschenverstand, et cetera und so weiter are usually unavailing for purposes of convincing one's interlocutor.

And yet we must take some things as given and non-negotiable. Welcome to the human epistemic predicament.

Reification and Hypostatization

My tendency has long been to use 'reification' and 'hypostatization' interchangeably. But a remark by E. J. Lowe has caused me to see the error of my ways. He writes, "Reification is not the same as hypostatisation, but is merely the acknowledgement of some putative entity's real existence." ("Essence and Ontology," in Novak et al. eds, Metaphysics: Aristotelian, Analytic, Scholastic, Ontos Verlag, 2012, p. 95) I agree with the first half of Lowe's sentence, but not the second.

Lowe's is a good distinction and I take it on board. I will explain it in my own way. Something can be real without being a substance, without being an entity logically capable of independent existence. An accident, for example, is real but is not a substance. 'Real' from L. res, rei. Same goes for the form of a hylomorphic compound. A statue is a substance but its form, though real, is not. The smile on a face and the bulge in a carpet are both real but incapable of independent existence. So reification is not the same as hypostatization. To consider or treat x as real is not thereby to consider or treat x as a substance.

Lowe seems to ignore that 'reification' and 'hypostatization' name logico-philosophical fallacies, where a fallacy is a typical mistake in reasoning, one that occurs often enough and is seductive enough to be given a label. On this point I diverge from him. For me, reification is the illict imputation of ontological status to something that does not have such status. For example, to treat 'nothing' as a name for something is to reify nothing. If I say that nothing is in the drawer I am not naming something that is in the drawer. Nothing is precisely no thing. As I see it, reification is not acknowledgment of real existence, but an illict imputation of real existence to something that lacks it. I do not reify the bulge in a carpet when I acknowledge its reality.

Or consider the internal relation being the same color as. If two balls are (the same shade of) red, then they stand in this relation to each other. But this relation is an "ontological free lunch" not "an addition to being" to borrow some phaseology from David Armstrong. Internal relations have no ontological status. They reduce to their monadic foundations. The putatively relational fact Rab reduces to the conjunction of two monadic facts: Fa & Fb. To bring it about that two balls are the same color as each other it suffices that I paint them both red (or blue, etc.) I needn't do anything else. If this is right, then to treat internal relations as real is to commit the fallacy of reification. Presumably someone who reifies internal relations will not be tempted to hypostatize them.

To treat external relations as real, however, is not to reify them. On my use of terms, one cannot reify what is already real, any more than one can politicize what is already political. To bring it about that two red balls are two feet from each other, it does not suffice that I create two red balls: I must place them two feet from each other. The relation of being two feet from is therefore real, though presumably not a substance.

To hypostatize is is to treat as a substance what is not a substance. So the relation I just mentioned would be hypostatized were one to consider it as an entity capable of existing even if it didn't relate anything. Liberals who blame society for crime are often guilty of the fallacy of hypostatization. Society, though real, is not a substance, let alone an agent to which blame can be imputed.

If I am right then this is mistaken:

First, I have given good reasons for distinguishing the two terms. Second, the mistake of treating what is abstract as material is not the same as reification or hypostatization. For example, if someone were to regard the null set as a material thing, he would be making a mistake, but he would not be reifying or hypostatizing the the null set unless there were no null set.

Or consider the proposition expressed by 'Snow is white' and 'Schnee ist weiss.' This proposition is an abstact object. If one were to regardit as a material thing one would be making a mistake, but one would not be reifying it because it is already real. Nor would one be hypostatizing it since (arguably) it exists independently.

Religion Always Buries its Undertakers

Christopher Hitchens has been dead for over a year now. He will be joined by Dennett and Dawkins, Grayling and Harris, and the rest of the militant atheists.

Religion, like philosophy, always buries its undertakers.

It was Etienne Gilson who famously remarked that "Philosophy always buries its undertakers." That is the first of his "laws of philosophical experience." (The Unity of Philosophical Experience, Scribners, 1937, p. 306) As a metaphilosophical pronunciamento it is hard to beat. It is equally true that philosophy always resurrects its dead. Let that be my first law. The history of natural science is littered with corpses, none of which is an actual or potential Lazarus. Not so in philosophy.

I continue the thought in Philosophy Always Resurrects its Dead.

Properties as Parts: More on Constituent Ontology

Skin and seeds are proper parts of a tomato, and the tomato is an improper part of itself. But what about such properties as being red, being ripe, being a tomato? Are they parts of the tomato? The very idea will strike many as born of an elementary confusion, as a sort of Rylean category mistake. "Your tomato is concrete and so are its parts; properties are abstract; nothing concrete can have abstract parts." Or: "Look, properties are predicable entities; parts are not. Having seeds is predicable of the tomato but not seeds! You're talking nonsense!"

I concede that the notion that the properties of an ordinary particular are parts thereof, albeit in some extended unmereological sense of 'part,' is murky. Murky as it is, the motivation for the view is fairly clear, and the alternative proposed by relational ontologists is open to serious objection. First I will say something in motivation of the constituent-ontological (C-ontological view). Then I will raise objections to the relational-ontological (R-ontological) approach.

For C-Ontology

Plainly, the blueness of my coffee cup belongs to the cup; it is not off in a realm apart. The blueness (the blue, if you will) is at the cup, right here, right now. I see that the cup before me now is blue. This seeing is not a quasi-Platonic visio intellectualis but a literal seeing with the eyes. How else would I know that the cup is blue, and in need of a re-fill, if not by looking at the cup? Seeing that the cup is blue, I see blueness (blue). I see blueness here and now in the mundus sensibilis. How could I see (with the eyes) that the cup is blue without seeing (with the same eyes) blueness? If blueness is a universal, then I see a universal, an instantiated universal. If blueness is a trope, then I see a trope, a trope compresent with others. Either way I see a property. So some properties are visible. This would be impossible if properties are abstract objects as van Inwagen and the boys maintain. Whether uninstantiated or instantiated abstract properties are invisible.

Properties such as blueness and hardness, etc. are empirically detectable. Blueness is visible while hardness is tangible. That looks to be a plain datum. Their being empirically detectable rules out their being causally inert abstracta off in a quasi-Platonic realm apart. For I cannot see something without causally interacting with it. So not only is the cup concrete, its blueness is as well.

This amounts to an argument that properties are analogous to parts. They are not parts in the strict mereological sense. They are not physical parts. So let's call them metaphysical or ontological constituents. The claim, then, is that ordinary particulars such as tomatoes and cups have their properties, or at least some of them, by having them as ontological constituents. To summarize the argument:

1. Some of the properties of ordinary concrete material particulars are empirically detectable at the places the particulars occupy and at the times they occupy them.

2. No abstract object is empirically detectable. Therefore:

3. Some properties of ordinary concrete material particulars are not abtract objects. Therefore:

4. It is reasonable to conjecture that some of the properties of ordinary concrete material particulars are analogous to (proper) parts of them.

Against R-Ontology

I grant that the above is not entirely clear, and that it raises questions that are not easy to answer. But does R-ontology fare any better? I don't think so.

Suppose an R-ontologist is staring at my blue cup. Does he see something colorless? Seems he would have to if the blueness of the cup is an abstract object merely related by exemplification to the concrete cup. Abstracta are invisible. Suppose we introduce 'stripped particular' to designate the R-ontological counterpart of what C-ontologists intend with 'bare particular' and 'thin particular.' A stripped particular is an ordinary particular devoid of empirically detectable properties. If the R-ontologist thinks that my cup is a stripped particular, then he is surely wrong. Call this the Stripped Particular Objection.

But if the R-ontologist agrees with me that the blueness is empirically detectable, then he seems to be involved in an unparsimonious duplication of properties. There is the invisible abstract property in Plato's heaven or Frege's Third Reich that is expressed by the open sentence or predicate '___ is blue.' And there is the property (or property-instance) that even the R-ontologist sees when he stares at a blue coffee cup.

Isn't that one property too many? What work does the abstract property do? More precisely, what ontological work does it do? I needn't deny that it does some semantic work: it serves as the sense (Fregean Sinn) of the corresponding predicate. But we are doing ontology here, not semantics. We want to understand what the world — extramental, extralinguistic reality — must be like if a sentence like 'This cup is blue' is true. We want to understand the property-possession in reality that underlies true predications at the level of language. We are not concerned here with the apparatus by which we represent the world; we are concerned with the world represented.

In my existence book I called the foregoing the Duplication Objection, though perhaps I could have hit upon a better moniker. The abstract property is but an otiose duplicate of the property that does the work, the empirically detectable propery that induces causal powers in the thing that has it.

So I present the R-ontologist with a dilemma: either you are embracing stripped particulars or you are involved in a useless multiplication of entities.

Coda

It's Christmas Eve and there is more to life than ontology. So I'll punch the clock for today. But there are two important questions we need to pursue. (1) Couldn't we reject the whole dispute and be neither a C- nor an R-ontologist? (2) Should ontologists be in the business of explanation at all? (My point that abstract properties are useless for purposes of accounting for predication and property-possession presupposes that there is such a legitimate enterprise as philosophical explanation.)

Bill O’Reilly: Christianity not a Religion, but a Philosophy

Bill O'Reilly does a lot of good, but he made a fool of himself last night on his O'Reilly Factor. It was painful to watch. In the course of a heated exchange with David Silverman, president of American Atheists, O'Reilly claimed that Christianity is not a religion, but a philosophy. At first I thought I had misheard, but Mr. Bill repeated the ridiculous assertion.

And yet O'Reilly was right to oppose the extremism of Silverman and the zealots who seek to remove every vestige of religion from the public square, though they seem to be rather less zealous when it comes to the 'religion of peace.'

It is not enough to have the right view; one must know how to defend it properly. A bad argument for a true conclusion gives the impression that there are no good arguments for it. And this is where conservatives tend to fall short. See my Anti-Intellectualism on the Right and Why Are Conservatives Inarticulate?

O'Reilly's bizarre assertion shows that he has no understanding of the differences among philosophy, religion, and Christianity. For part of my views on the differences between philosophy and religion, see here. There is room for disagreement on the exact definition of 'religion,' but if anything is clear, it is that Christianity is a religion. O'Reilly only dug his hole deeper when he claimed that while Christianity is a philosophy, Methodism is a religion!

I am reminded of the inarticulate George W. Bush. He once claimed that Jesus was his favorite philosopher. That silly assertion showed that Bush understood neither philosophy nor Jesus. Jesus claimed not only to know the truth, but to be the truth. "I am the way, the truth, and the life . . . ." That is a claim that no philosopher qua philosopher can make. A philosopher is a mere seeker of truth, not a possessor of it, let alone truth's very incarnation. A philosopher is a person who is ignorant, knows that he is, and seeks to remedy his deficiency.

Neither God nor Christ are philosophers. And we can thank God for that!

The Insolubility of Philosophical Problems: The Augustine Story Adapted

Long ago I was told the following story by a nun. One day St. Augustine was walking along the seashore, thinking about the Trinity. He came upon a child who had dug a hole in the sand and was busy filling it with buckets of seawater.

Augustine: "What are you doing?"

Child: "I am trying to empty the ocean into this hole."

Augustine: "But that’s impossible!"

Child: "No more impossible than your comprehending the Trinity."

What holds for the Trinity holds for the great problems of philosophy: we can no more solve them than the child could empty the sea into a hole on the seashore. Our minds are not large enough for these problems, not strong enough, not free enough from distorting, distracting, suborning factors. We know that from experience.

Philosophy teaches us humility. This is one of its most important uses. And this despite the fact that too many paid professors of it are the exact opposite of humble truth-seekers. But worse still are the scientistic scientists whose arrogance is fueled by profound ignorance of the questions and traditions that made their own enterprise possible.

Deus ex Machina Objections in Philosophy: Leibniz contra Malebranche

I have been searching various databases such as JSTOR without success for a good article on deus ex machina objections in philosophy. What exactly is a deus ex machina (DEM)? When one taxes a theory or an explanatory posit with DEM, what exactly is one alleging? How does a DEM differ from a legitimate philosophical explanation that invokes divine or some other nonnaturalistic agency? Since it is presumably the case that not every recourse to divine agency in philosophical theories is a DEM, what exactly distinguishes legitimate recourse to divine agency from DEM? Herewith, some preliminary exploratory notes on deus ex machina.

This question is personally very interesting to me because Arianna Betti here (third paragraph) accuses my theory of facts of deus ex machina, a theory I initially sketched in my 2000 Nous article "Three Conceptions of States of Affairs" and then presented more fully in my 2002 Existence book.

1. Deus ex machina is Latin for 'God out of a machine.' Let us begin by making a distinction between DEM objections in literary criticism and in philosophy. A DEM objection can be brought against a play or a novel if the behavior of a character is not "necessary or probable" (as Aristotle puts it at Poetics 1454a37) given the way the character has already been depicted, or if an incident is not a "necessary or probable" consequence of earlier incidents. From a lit-crit point of view, then, a playwright or a novelist can be taxed with a DEM if he allows something to irrupt into the scene from outside it which doesn't fit with the characters and action so far depicted. As I understand it, the literal meaning of 'DEM' comes from the lowering of a god via stage machinery into the setting of an ancient Greek play. See, for example, Plato, Cratylus 425d where Plato has Socrates speak of "the tragic poets who, in any perplexity have their gods waiting in the air . . . ." If any novelist or playwright is reading this, he is invited to supply some examples of DEM and explain what is wrong with them.

2. My interest, however, is less literary and aesthetic than philosophical. In the context of philosophical
and perhaps also scientific explanations, a DEM objection would be to the effect that illegitimate recourse has been had to an explanatory posit that belongs to an order radically other than the order of the explananda. I put it so abstractly because I want to leave open the possibility of DEM objections to
explanations that invoke agents or powers other than God. We now consider two putative examples of DEM. The first is Leibniz's recourse to God in his solution of the mind-body problem and in his theory of causation generally, and the second is Malebranche's invocation of God for a similar purpose. What is
particularly interesting is that Leibniz accuses Malebranche of deus ex machina, but does not consider himself liable to the same objection.

3. Leibniz, Psychophysical Parallelism, and Pre-Established Harmony. There are reasons to believe that psychophysical interaction is impossible. Indeed, Leibniz has reasons for denying intersubstantial causal influx quite generally, even between two material substances. And there are reasons to believe that (i) there are both mental events and physical events as modifications of mental and physical substances respectively and (ii) these events are mutually irreducible. Suppose you accept both sets of reasons. And suppose you want to explain the apparent law-like correlation and covariation of mental and physical events, e.g., how a desire for a cup of coffee, which is mental, is correlated with the physical events that eventuate in your bringing a cup of coffee to your lips. Or, proceeding in the other direction, you want an explanation of why a hammer blow to a finger causes pain. Given that psychophysical interaction is impossible and that there are mutually irreducible mental and physical events, how explain the 'constant conjunction' of the two sorts of event?

One might be tempted by a theory along the lines of Leibniz's pre-established harmony. Roughly, on such a theory there is no intersubstantial causal interaction: the states of one substance cannot act upon the states of another. But there is intrasubstantial causation: the states of a substance cause later states of the same substance. So physical events in a body are caused by earlier physical events in the same body, and mental events in a mind are caused by earlier mental events in the same mind. Mental-physical correlation is explained in terms of pre-established harmony: "each created substance is programmed at creation such that all its natural states and actions are carried out in conformity with all the natural states and actions of every other created substance."(link) The explanation thus invokes
God as the agent who establishes the harmony when he creates finite substances.

A standard analogy for the parallelism is in terms of two perfectly synchronized clocks. Whenever clock A shows 12, clock B strikes 12. There is an Humean 'constant conjunction' of striking and showing, but no showing causes a striking if 'causes' means produces or brings into existence. What accounts for the constant conjunction is the pre-synchronization by an agent external to the two clocks. Similarly with all apparent causal interactions: there are in reality no intersubstantial causal interactions, given the windowlessness of Leibnizian monads, but there are law-like correlations which constitute causation a phenomenon bene fundata. But these law-like correlations are grounded in the harmony among the internal states of the monads established when God first created the entire system of finite monads.

4. Now here is my question: Can one dismiss this Leibnizian scheme by saying it is a deus ex machina? Note that on Leibniz's scheme God plays an explanatory role not only with respect to the mind-body problem, but also with respect to the phenomenon of secondary or natural causation in general. For without the monadic harmony pre-established by God when he created the system of finite monads, there would be no law-like regularity such as constitutes causation in the phenomenal world.

Is the Leibnizian proposal a deus ex machina or is it a legitimate form of philosophical explanation? The logically prior question is: What exactly is a DEM? I can think of five answers.

Answer One: Any appeal to a supernatural agent in a theory of natural phenomena is a DEM. On this latitudinarian understanding of DEM, any reference to God in a theory of causation or a theory of truth or a theory of objective value would be a DEM. If this is what is meant by a DEM, then of course Leibnizian parallelism is a DEM. But surely this understanding of DEM is entirely too broad and ought
to be rejected. For it allows that any explanation of anything that invokes God is a DEM. But then the problem is not primarily that Leibniz brings God into the theory of mind and body, or the theory of secondary causes, but that he invokes God to explain the existence of things. To give a cosmological argument for the existence of God would be to commit a DEM. But surely a sophisticated cosmological argument for the existence of God cannot be dismissed by slapping the 'DEM' label on it.

It is different if one is seeking a scientific explanation of the very existence of things. The rules of the scientific game preclude the invocation of anything beyond the natural order, beyond the realm of space-time-matter. My concern, however, is DEM as a philosophical objection. That being understood, we can safely set aside Answer One.

Answer Two: An appeal to a supernatural agent in a theory of natural phenomena is a DEM if and only if no independent reasons are given for the existence of the supernatural agent. This is a much better answer. But then one will not be able to tax Leibniz with a DEM since he gives various arguments for the existence of God. The same goes for other philosophers such as Descartes and Berkeley who 'put God to work' in their systems. If one can supply reasons for the existence of God that are independent of the natural phenomenon to be explained, then it is legitimate to invoke God for explanatory purposes.

But this second answer seems to have a flaw. Why would the reasons for the supernatural agent have to be independent, i.e., independent of the job the agent is supposed to do? Suppose the appeal to a divine agent takes the form of an inference to the best or the only possible explanation of the natural explananda. Then the appeal to the divine agent would be rationally justified despite the fact that the agent is posited to do a specific job. Accordingly, Leibnizian pre-established harmony could be interpreted as an argument for God as the best explanation of the phenomena of natural causation.

Answer Three: An appeal to a supernatural agent in a theory of natural phenomena is a DEM iff no reasons are supplied for the existence of the divine agent. This is an improvement over Answer Two, but a problem remains. Suppose a philosopher gives arguments for the existence of God, and then puts God to work in the phenomenal world. If the work he does involves the violation of natural laws, then his workings here below are miraculous in one sense of the term and for this reason philosophically objectionable. So we advance to

Answer Four: An appeal to a supernatural agent in a theory of natural phenomena is a DEM
iff EITHER no reasons are supplied for the existence of the divine agent, OR the working of the agent violates natural laws. But in Malebranche's system, neither disjunct is satisfied, and yet Leibniz accuses Malebranche of DEM. For Malebranche there is only one genuine cause and that is God, the causa
prima. All so-called secondary causes are but occasions for the exercise of divine causality. Thus the occurrence of event e1 is not what makes e2 occur; God creates e1 and then e2 in such a way as to satisfy the Humean requirements of temporal precedence of cause over effect; spatiotemporal contiguity of cause and effect, and constant conjunction, which is the notion that whenever events of the first type occur they are contiguously succeeded by events of the second type. On this scheme, no causal power is exercised except divine causal power, which involves God in every causal transaction in the natural world. Leibniz objects that this is a DEM because it makes of each cause a miracle. (See Kenneth Clatterbaugh, The Causation Debate in Modern Philosophy, 1637-1739, p. 122.)

But it is not a miracle in the sense of the violation of a natural law. It is a miracle in the sense that the
work that should be done by a finite substance is being done by God. A miracle for Leibniz need not be an unusual event; an event that surpasses the power of a natural substance can also be a miracle. Thus Malebranche's denial of causal efficacy to finite substances makes God's involvement in nature miraculous, which amounts to saying that the appeal to God is a DEM.

Answer Five: An appeal to a supernatural agent in a theory of natural phenomena is a DEM iff EITHER no reasons are supplied for the existence of the divine agent, OR the working of the agent violates natural laws, OR the agent's intervention in nature is miraculous in the sense in that it takes over a job that ought to be done by a natural entity. But if this answer be adopted, then Leibniz himself can be accused of DEM! Arguably, the job of grounding mental-physical correlations ought to be done by the terms of theose correlations and not by God.

5. The foregoing remarks are highly tentative and inadequate, but at least they show that a lot of work needs to be done in this area of metaphilosophy.

A Reader Wants an Introduction to Philosophy

M. T. writes,

I've followed your blog for a few months now. I feel compelled to say thank you for the content of your posts. They are usually trenchant, always interesting, and occasionally they lead me to delve into topics and categories that I have never explored previously.

Some background: I'm an Arabic linguist for the Navy. I currently live in Georgia, but was born and reared in Florida. I pretty much agree with everything you've said on political topics.

A question for you: I didn't study philosophy, but am extremely well read in history and politics (particularly ancient history). You obviously were a academician, but if I wanted to get grounded in the current state of philosophy, where do I start? The field is so vast, so opaque and confusing. Am I better off just reading Plato and perhaps William James?

Again, thank you for a wonderful blog. I always try to learn something new every day, and your writing makes it easier for me to accomplish that task.

I of course appreciate the kind words, and the regular arrival of letters like this in my mail box is emolument aplenty for my pro bono efforts.

First of all, I wouldn't worry too much about the current state of philosophy because much that is current is ephemeral and even foolish. I would concern myself more with an introduction to the perennial problems of philosophy. To understand the sometimes strange things that philosophers say one must first understand the questions that perplexed them and the problems they were trying to solve. With that in mind I recommend two short well-written books, the first from 1912 and the second from 1987: Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy; Thomas Nagel, What Does It All Mean? I commend the following advice to you from p. 4 of Nagel's book:

The center of philosophy lies in certain questions which the reflective human mind finds naturally puzzling, and the best way to begin the study of philosophy is to think about them directly. Once you've done that, you are in a better position to apprecdiate the work of others who have tried to solve the same problems.

Sage advice. There is no point in studying philosophy unless there are some questions that 'bug' you and to which you want and need answers. Think about them directly, and try to answer them for yourself. Then test your answers against the answers more experienced thinkers have proposed.

For example, suppose you are interested in the question of the freedom of the will. Formulated as a problem, it is the problem of reconciling the freedom of the will presupposed by ascriptions of moral responsibility with the apparent determinism of the natural world of which the agent is a part. So you think about it. You don't get very far on your own, so you seek help. You turn to Schopenhauer's magisterial On the Freedom of the Will for orientation. You get that and more: data, distinctions, the history of the problem and the various solutions, and Schopenhauer's own solution. And so it goes.

The ComBox is open in case anyone wants to suggest titles for my reader.

Asceticism

A reader writes,

I am a philosopher and a conservative (in many ways) and I enjoy your blog very much. One thing I find rather puzzling (and interesting), though, is your extreme asceticism. Recently, you said:

"Well, we know that drinking and dancing won't get us anywhere. But it is at least possible that thinking and trancing will."

I guess I wonder just _where_ it is that you are trying to get and what is so great about being there such that it is better than enjoying some drinking and dancing (in moderation, of course).

Well, if I am an extreme ascetic, then what was Simeon Stylites? I am not now, and never have been, a pillar-dweller exposed to the elements.

'Asceticism' is from the Greek askesis meaning 'self-denial.' On a spectrum from extreme self-indulgence on the left to extreme self-denial on the right, I would place myself somewhere in the middle, moving on my better days right-ward and on the others left-ward. So you could say that I am a mild-to-moderate ascetic. I believe in the value of self-denial and self-control in thought, word, and deed. That self-control with respect to words and deeds are essential to human flourishing I take to be well-nigh self-evident. Control of thought, however, is also essential to happiness which is why one ought so spend some time each day in formal meditation. (More on this in Meditation and Spiritual Exercises categories.)

But not only is control of thought conducive to, and indeed a necessary condition of, happiness, it is morally obligatory to control and in some cases eliminate some thoughts. I argue that out in Can Mere Thoughts be Morally Wrong? and Thoughts as Objects of Moral Evaluation: Refining the Thesis.

Moderate asceticism is good and is enjoined by all the major religions and wisdom traditions. It is perfectly obvious that many of the problems we face today result from the lack of self-control. Obesity, for example. Debt, both at the personal level and at the level of government, is fundamentally a moral problem with at least one of its roots sunk deep in lack of self-control.

If you are running credit card debt, you are doing something very foolish. Why do you buy what you can't afford with money you don't have? You must know that you are wasting huge amounts of money on interest. Why doesn't this knowledge cause you to be prudent in your expenditures? Because you never learned how to control yourself. Perhaps you were brought up by liberals who think the summum bonum is self-indulgence and 'getting in touch with your feelings.' By the way, this in another powerful argument against liberalism. There is no wisdom on the Left. The last thing you will learn from liberals are the virtues and the vices and the seven deadly sins. For liberals, these are topics to joke about.

No one preaches self-denial anymore. We have become a nation of moral wimps. We need a taste of
the strenuosity of yesteryear, and who better to serve it up than our very own William James, he of the Golden Age of American philosophy:

Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every day. That is, be systematically heroic in little unnecessary points, do every day or two something for no other reason than its difficulty, so that, when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved and untrained to stand the test. Asceticism of this sort is like the insurance which a man pays on his house and goods. The tax does him no good at the time, and possibly may never bring him a return. But, if the fire does come, his having paid it will be his salvation from ruin. So with the man who has daily inured himself to habits of
concentrated attention, energetic volition, and self-denial in unnecessary things. He will stand like a tower when everything rocks around him, and his softer fellow-mortals are winnowed like chaff in the blast.

We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone. Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never-so-little scar. The drunken Rip Van Winkle, in Jefferson's play, excuses himself for every fresh dereliction by saying, "I won't count this time!" Well, he may not count it, and a kind Heaven may not count it; but it is being counted none the less. Down among his nerve-cells and fibres the molecules are counting it, registering and storing it up to be used against him when the next temptation.

Back to drinking and dancing and the reader's question. Everything depends on what one considers to be the purpose of life. To me it is clear that we are not here to have a 'good time.' For me philosophy is not an academic game but a spiritual quest for the ultimate truth. The quest involves rigorous, technical philosophy, but it also involves non-discursive spiritual exercises. These are impossible without a certain amount of moral purification and ascesis. They are also best pursued in the early hours before dawn. So right here is an excellent reason not to waste the evening hours in idle talk, drinking and dancing. These activities are not conducive to spiritual progress. That is why some of us avoid them.

In the Dark

We are all in the dark, but the philosophers among us know it. The enlightenment they provide is mainly of a negative nature: they cast a bright light on our ignorance. And sometimes they do so willy-nilly, by contradicting each other.

Permanence and Impermanence

Both worldling and philosopher distinguish between the permanent and the impermanent. How then do they differ? For the philosopher what the worldling calls permanent is impermanent, while for the worldling what the philosopher calls permanent doesn't exist.

What is Left for Philosophy to Do?

Much of what was once in the province of philosophy now belongs to the sciences. Might it be that eventually everything once claimed by philosophy will be taken over by special sciences? I recently took Lawrence Krauss to task here and here for his latest scientistic outburst according to which philosophical problems, "when the grow up, leave home." He maintains that all answerable questions belong in the domain of empirical science. Is that right? Is it true that, eventually, there will nothing left for philosophy to do? Or are there certain problems and questions that will remain specifically philosophical? I suggest that in the following four areas philosophy has and will retain its proprietary rights in perpetuity.

A. Metaphilosophical Questions. Let us first note that the questions raised in my introductory paragraph belong to philosophy. They are questions about philosophy. All such metaphilosophical questions belong to philosophy. The philosophy of science (religion, law, etc.) is not part of science (religion, law, etc.), but the philosophy of philosophy is a branch of philosophy. There is simply no more encompassing rational discipline than philosophy. So right here we have a number of questions that do not belong to any empirical science or to any formal science such as mathematics either. (Whether or not you want to call mathematics science, it is certainly not empirical science.)

Consider the question of scientism. When properly employed, the term 'scientism' means the following.

Scientism is a philosophical thesis that belongs to the sub-discipline of epistemology. It is not a thesis in science, but a thesis about science. The thesis in its strongest form is that the only genuine knowledge is scientific knowledge, the knowledge generated by the (hard) sciences of physics, chemistry, biology and their offshoots. The thesis in a weaker form allows some cognitive value to the social sciences, the humanities, and other subjects, but insists that scientific knowledge is vastly superior and authoritative and is as it were the 'gold standard' when it comes to knowledge. On either strong or weak scientism, there is no room for first philosophy, according to which philosophy is an autonomous discipline, independent of natural science, and authoritative in respect to it. So on scientism, natural science sets the standard in matters epistemic, and philosophy’s role is at best ancillary. Not a handmaiden to theology in this day and age; a handmaiden to science.

The question whether scientism is true is a philosophical question that cannot by its very nature be answered by any empirical science. Not only is this question not discussed in any physics or chemistry or biology text, it is not a question to the answering of which observation and experiment are at all relevant. The question whether the only genuine knowledge is scientific knowlerdge is not an empirical question. It is not like the question whether high sodium intake is a contributing factor in hypertension or whether galactic recession is taking place.

Those who champion scientism are doing philosophy whether they know it or not, and presupposing that there are specifically philosophical theses. For scientism is a philosophical thesis. Not only is scientism a philosophical thesis, it is an untenable philosophical thesis (as I argue here) the critique of which belongs to philosophy. Both the forwarding of the thesis and its evaluation as untenable are specifically philosophical activities. One of the perennial tasks of philosophy is the debunking of bad philosophy or pseudo-philosophy of the sort produced by ignorant people like Krauss.

B. Normative Questions. There are normative questions of various sorts in logic, epistemology, aesthetics, ethics, and politology. Empirical investigation cannot answer normative questions. Consider the theory of the state. A good chunk of it will be covered by political science which, perhaps, is independent of philosophy. Political science studies the types, characteristics, institutions, and genesis of states and other political entities as they actually exist. It is a non-normative enterprise devoted to facts and their explanation. It will of course treat of the norms embedded in laws and institutions but will study these norms as facts. One can study the content of legal prescriptions and proscriptions under bracketing of their rightness or wrongness. To do so is to study them as facts. Thus one could study the content of the Nazi state's Nuremberg Laws without raising the question of their justice or injustice. Questions about the moral legitimacy of a given state or of any state are quite different from the factual questions treated in political science: they are normative questions belonging to political philosophy. If I study the structure of the Nazi state and its institutions and hierarchies I am doing political science. But if I argue that the Nazi state was a criminal state or an unjust state then I have moved into the normative dimension and am doing political philosophy.

Or consider logic. It does not reduce to the psychology of reasoning, let alone to the neurobiology underlying reasoning. It is a normative discipline concerned, not with how we think as a matter of fact, but how we ought to think if we are to arrive at truth. Similar considerations hold for epistemology, aesthetics, and ethics. Suppose you disagree with what I just said about logic. Then we have a dispute in the philosophy of logic, and once again philosophy is seen to be indispensable.

3. Critical Questions. One can raise critical questions about religion, mysticism, law, science and other sectors of culture. A critique of religion, for example, aims to separate out the true from the false and the beneficial from the harmful in religion. It aims to evaluate religion as a cultural form. This is different from the descriptive study of extant religions. A critique of Buddhism, for example, goes beyond a study of characteristic Buddhist beliefs and practices; it is concerned to evaluate these beliefs and practices in the light of such criteria as logical coherence, truth, and whether they help or hinder human flourishing. Such an evaluation is obviously a specifically philosophical enterprise. It cannot be supplanted by the sociology or psychology of Buddhism. Suppose it is established that Buddhism appeals to people of a certain psychological make-up or social class. That is an interesting fact, but is irrelevant to the question whether Buddhism is wholly or in part logically coherent, true, or conducive to human flourishing. The critique of Buddhism, and of any religion, belongs to philosophy. And the same goes for the critique of mysticism, law, and the rest.

4. Metaphysical Questions. These are non-normative but also non-empirical questions. They have no place within the province of any empirical science.

There are the questions of general metaphysics or ontology. Among them: questions about existence, identity, properties, relations, modality. Consider these two claims:

a. Principle of the Rejection of Nonexistent Objects: Necessarily, for any x, if x has properties, then x exists.

b. Principle of the Rejection of Unpropertied Objects: Necessarily, for any x, if x exists, then x has properties.

I say both are true propositions of general metaphysics. They are items of knowledge about the structure of any possible world, and therefore items of knowledge about the structure of the actual world. But we do not know them by any empirical method: they do not belong in an empirical science.

The principles are not truths of pure logic either. For their negations are not logical contradictions. They are irreducibly ontological truths. The belong to metaphysca generalis or ontology.

The Meinongians deny (a). Where does the dispute about (a) belong? In physics? You would have to be as thoughtless as Krauss to maintain such a thing. It belongs nowhere else but in philosophy.

There are also the questions of special metaphysics, among them, questions about God, the soul, the freedom of the will, and the relationof mind and body.

When Philosophical Questions Grow Up Do They Leave Home? Some Bad Arguments of Lawrence Krauss Exposed

A tip of the hat to Professor Joel Hunter for referring me to a recent discussion between philosopher Julian Baggini and physicist Lawrence Krauss. We have come to expect shoddy scientistic reasoning from Professor Krauss (see here) and our expectation is duly fulfilled on this occasion as on the others.

The issue under debate is whether there are any answerable questions in which philosophy has proprietary rights. Are there any questions that are specifically philosophical and thus beyond the purview of the sciences? Or are all answerable questions scientific questions? For Krauss, ". . . all the answerable ones end up moving into the domain of empirical knowledge, aka science." When philosophical questions "grow up, they leave home."

Moral (ethical) questions have traditionally belonged to philosophy. If Krauss and his scientistic brethren are right, however, these questions, if answerable, will be answered empirically: "science provides the basis for moral decisions . . . ." Baggini makes the expected response:

My contention is that the chief philosophical questions are those that grow up without leaving home, important questions that remain unanswered when all the facts are in. Moral questions are the prime example. No factual discovery could ever settle a question of right or wrong. But that does not mean that moral questions are empty questions or pseudo-questions.

Baggini's is a stock response but none the worse for that. Krauss' rejoinder is entirely lame:

Take homosexuality, for example. Iron age scriptures might argue that homosexuality is "wrong", but scientific discoveries about the frequency of homosexual behaviour in a variety of species tell us that it is completely natural in a rather fixed fraction of populations and that it has no apparent negative evolutionary impacts. This surely tells us that it is biologically based, not harmful and not innately "wrong".

Here we observe once again the patented Kraussian 'bait and switch' dialectical ploy. Note the scare quotes around 'wrong.' Krauss is switching from the relevant normative sense of the word to an irrelevant nonnormative sense. That is the same type of trick he pulled with respect to the Leibnizian question why there is something rather than nothing. He baited us with a promise to answer the Leibnizian question but all he did was switch from the standard meaning of 'nothing' to a special meaning all his own according to which nothing is something. So instead of answering the question he baited us with — the old Leibniz question — he substituted a different physically tractable question and then either stupidly or dishonestly passed off the answer to the physically tractable question as the answer to the philosophical question.

He is doing the same thing with the homosexuality question. He is equivocating on 'right' and 'wrong' as between nonnormative and normative senses of the term. Avoid that confusion and you will be able to see that a practice cannot be shown to be morally acceptable by showing that the practice is engaged in. Slavery and ethnic cleansing are practices which have proven to be be very effective by nonnormative criteria. World War II in the Pacific was ended by the nuclear slaughter of noncombatants. Questions about moral acceptability and unacceptability cut perpendicular to questions about effectiveness, survival value and the like.

There is also this Kraussian gem:

. . . that many moral convictions vary from society to society means that they are learned and, therefore, the province of psychology. Others are more universal and are, therefore, hard-wired – a matter of neurobiology. A retreat to moral judgment too often assumes some sort of illusionary belief in free will which I think is naive.

Three non sequiturs in two sentences. That's quite a trick!

A. Yes, moral convictions vary from society to society, and yes, they are learned. But Krauss confuses moral convictions as facts (which belong to psychology and sociology) with the content of moral convictions. For example, I am convinced that rape is morally wrong. My being so convinced is a psychological fact about me. It is an empirical fact and can be studied like any empirical fact. We can ask how I cam to hold the conviction. But my being convinced is distinct from the content of the conviction which is expressible in the sentence 'Rape is morally wrong.' That sentence says nothing about me or about any agent or about the psychological state of any agent. Confusing convictions and their contents, Krauss wrongly infers that moral questions are in the province of psychology as an empirical science when all he is entitled to conclude is that things like the incidence, distribution, and causes of moral beliefs belong in the province of psychology, sociology and related disciplines.

B. With respect to universal moral beliefs, Krauss falls into the same confusion. He confuses the moral belief or conviction qua psychological fact about an agent with its content. Even if my being convinced that X is morally wrong falls within neurobiology, because the being convinced is a state of brain, the content doesn't. A further problem with what he is saying is that moral beliefs cannot be identical to neural states. It is obvious that my moral convictions, as facts, belong to psychology; but it is the exact opposite of obvious that some of my moral convictions — the universal ones — belong to neurobiology. No doubt they have neurobiological correlates, but correlation is not identity.

C. Krauss thinks that the belief in free will is "illusionary." This is a nonsensical view shared by other scientistic types such as Jerry Coyne. ( See here.) It is also difficult to square with Krauss' own apparent belief in free will: "We have an intellect and can therefore override various other biological tendencies in the name of social harmony." So, holding social harmony to be a value we freely restrain ourselves and override out biological tendencies when we get the urge to commit rape. The man cannot see that his theory is inconsistent with the course of action he is recommending.

There is a bit more to the Krauss-Baggini discussion, but the quality is so low that I won't waste any more time on it.

Rigor and Cognitivity

Some say philosophy lacks rigor. Well, some does, but the best doesn't. People who bemoan a lack of rigor in philosophy are typically unacquainted with its best authors. The problem with philosophy is not lack of rigor but lack of cognitivity. The lack of cognitivity, however, does not detract from philosophy's value. Is there no value in the Socratic docta ignorantia?

Could a Universe of Contingent Beings be Necessary?

If everything in the universe is contingent, does it follow that the universe is contingent? No it doesn't, and to think otherwise would be to commit the fallacy of composition. If the parts of a whole have a certain property, it does not follow that the whole has that property. But it is a simple point of logic that a proposition's not following from another is consistent with the proposition's being true.

And so while one cannot straightaway infer the contingency of the universe from the contingency of its parts, it is nevertheless true that the universe is contingent. Or so I shall argue.

The folowing tripartition is mutually exclusive and mutually exhaustive: necessary, impossible, contingent. A necessary (impossible, contingent) being is one that exists in all (none, some but not all) possible worlds. I will assume an understanding of possible worlds talk. See my Modal Matters category for details.

Our question is whether the universe U, all of whose members are contingent, is itself contingent. I say it is, and argue as follows.

1. Necessarily, if U has no members, then U does not exist. (This is because U is just the totality of its members: it is not something in addition to them. If U has three members, a, b, and c, then U is just those three members taken collectively: it is not a fourth thing distinct from each of the members. U depends for its existence on the existence of its members.)

2. There is a possible world w in which there are no concrete contingent beings. (One can support this premise with a subtraction argument. If a world having n members is possible, then surely a world having n-1 members is possible. For example, take the actual world, which is one of the possible worlds, and substract me from it. Surely the result, though sadly impoverished, is a possible world. Subtract London Ed from the result. That too is a possible world. Iterate the subtraction procedure until you arrive at a world with n minus n ( = 0) concrete contingent members. One could also support the premise with a conceivability argument. It is surely conceivable that there be no concrete contingent beings. This does not entail, but is arguably evidence for, the proposition that it is possible that there be no concrete contingent beings.)

Therefore

3. W is a world in which U has no members. (This follows from (2) given that U is the totality of concrete contingent beings.)

Therefore

4. W is a world in which U does not exist. (From (1) and (3))

Therefore

5. U is a contingent being. (This follows from (4) and the definition of 'contingent being.')

Therefore

6. The totality of contingent beings is itself contingent, hence not necessary.

What is the relevance of this to cosmological arguments? If the universe is necessary, then one cannot sensibly ask why it exists. What must exist has the ground of its existence in itself. So, by showing that the universe is not necessary, one removes an obstacle to cosmological argumentation.

Now since my metaphilosophy holds that nothing of real importance can be strictly proven in philosophy, the above argument – which deals with a matter of real importance — does not strictly prove its conclusion. But it renders the conclusion rationally acceptable, which is all that we can hope for, and is enough.