Category: Metaphilosophy

“Philosophy Bakes No Bread”

It helps to be armed with ready ripostes to what the thoughtless will throw at you in the course of life.  What do you say in response to "Philosophy bakes no bread"?

1.  Philosophy bakes no bread. It bakes bliss instead.

2. Though philosophy bakes no bread, it is the mill that separate the wheat from the chaff of human experience.

3. Man does not live by bread alone.

4.  While it is true that philosophy bakes no bread, it is the press that converts the grapes of experience into the wine of wisdom.  Better to be drunk with wisdom than stuffed with bread.

5.  Philosophy does indeed bake bread, it is just that the bread it bakes is panem supersubstantialis and not panem quotidianis.

Philosophy Always Resurrects Its Dead

Raising_Lazarus007 Etienne Gilson 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.

None of the classical problems has ever been demonstrated to be a pseudoproblem pace Wittgenstein, Carnap and such epigoni as Morris Lazerowitz; none of the major theories proposed in solution of them has ever been  refuted once and for all; no school of thought has been finally discredited.

 

Thomism, to take an example, was once largely confined to the academic backwaters of Catholic colleges where sleepy Jesuits taught the ancient lore from dusty scholastic manuals to bored jocks.  (I am not being entirely fair, but fair enough for a blog post.)  But in the last twenty years an increasing number of sharp analytic heads have penetrated the scholastic arcana and have been serving up some fairly rigorous forward-looking stuff that engages with contemporary analytic work in a way that was simply beyond the abilities of (most) of the sleepy Jesuits and old-time scholastics.

Gilbert Ryle once predicted with absurd confidence, "Gegenstandstheorie . . . is dead, buried, and not going to be resurrected."  (Quoted in G. Priest, Towards Non-Being, Oxford, 2005, p. vi, n. 1.) Ryle was wrong, dead wrong, and shown to be wrong just a few years after his cocky prediction.  Variations on Meinong's Theory of Objects flourish like never before due to the efforts of such brilliant philosophers as Butchvarov, Castaneda, Lambert, Parsons, Priest, Routley/Sylvan, and Zalta, just to mention those that come first to mind. And the Rylean cockiness has had an ironic upshot: his logical behaviorism is temporarily dead while Meinongianism thrives.  But Ryle too will be raised if my parallel law of philosophical experience — Philosophy always resurrects its dead — holds.

It may be worth noting that if philosophy resurrects its dead then it can be expected to raise the anti-philosophical (and therefore philosophical) positions of philosophy's would-be undertakers.  Philosophy, she's a wily bitch: you can't outflank her and she always ends up on top.

God, Evil, Matter and Mind: How Both Theists and Materialists Stand Pat in the Face of Objections

It is a simple point of logic that if propositions p and q are both true, then they are logically consistent, though not conversely. So if God exists and Evil exists are both true, then they are logically consistent, whence it follows that it is possible that they be consistent. This is so whether or not anyone is in a position to explain how it is possible that they be consistent. If something is the case, then, by the time-honored principle ab esse ad posse valet illatio, it is possible that it be the case, and one's inability to explain how it is possible that it be the case cannot count as a good reason for thinking that it is not the case.

Example.  No one has successfully answered Zeno's Paradoxes of motion.  (No, kiddies, Wesley Salmon did not successfully rebut them; the 'calculus solution'  is a joke.) But from the fact, if it is a fact, that no one has ever shown HOW motion is possible, it does not follow that motion is not possible. 

So if it is the case that God exists and Evil exists are logically consistent, then this is possibly the case, and a theist's inability to explain how God and evil can coexist is not a good reason for him to abandon his theism — or his belief in the existence of objective evil.

The theist is rationally entitled to stand pat in the face of the 'problem of evil' and point to his array of arguments for the existence of God whose cumulative force renders rational his belief that God exists. Of course, he should try to answer the atheist who urges the inconsistency of God exists and Evil exists; but his failure to provide a satisfactory answer is not a reason for him to abandon his theism. A defensible attitude would be: "This is something we theists need to work on."

Atheists and naturalists ought not object to this standing pat since they do the same. What materialist about the mind abandons his materialism in the face of the various arguments (from intentionality, from qualia, from the unity of consciousness, from the psychological relevance of logical laws, etc.) that we anti-materialists marshall?

Does the materialist give in? Hell no, he stands pat, pointing to his array of arguments and considerations in favor of materialism, and when you try to budge him with the irreconcilability of intentionality and materialism, or qualia and materialism, or reason and materialism, or whatever, he replies, "This is something we materialists need to work on."  He is liable to start talking, pompously, of his 'research program.'  He may even wax quasi-religious with talk of "pinning his hopes on future science"  as if — quite absurdly — knowing more and more about the meat within our skulls will finally resolve the outstanding questions.  And what does science have to do with hope?  There is also something exceedingly curious about hoping that one turns out to be just a material system, a bit of dust in the wind.

"I was so hoping to be proved to be nothing more than a clever land mammal slated for destruction, but, dammit all, there are reasons to think that we are more than animals and have a higher destiny.  That sucks!"

Why Philosophy Matters

Nicholas Rescher, The Strife of Systems (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1985), p. 229:

The life of the mind, of which rational inquiry is an integral component, is an essential constituent of our conception of the human good.  And rational inquiry leads inexorably to philosophizing.  For we engage in philosophy not (merely) because it is intellectually diverting — a game one can play for its own sake.  It orients our thought, clarifies our values, guides our actions.  Philosophy matters because it clarifies and systematizes our thought about issues that matter.

Kleingeld, Meine Herren, Kleingeld!

Husserl used to say that to his seminarians to keep them careful and wissenschaftlich and away from assertions of the high-flying and sweeping sort.  Unfortunately, the philosophical small change doesn't add up.  Specialization, no matter how narrow and protracted, no matter how carefully pursued, fails to put us on the "sure path of science."

Given that plain fact, you may as well go for the throat of the Big Questions.  Aren't they what brought you  to philosophy in the first place?

This line of thought is pursued in Fred Sommers Abandons Whitehead and Metaphysics for Logic.

The Fly and the Fly Bottle

Why does the bug need to be shown the way out?  Pop the cork and he's gone.

Why did Wittgenstein feel the need to philosophize his way out of philosophy?  He should have known that metaphilosophy and anti-philosophy are just more philosophy with all that that entails: inconclusiveness, endlessness . . . .  He should have just walked away from it.

If the room is too smoky, there is no necessity that you remain in it.  You are free to go, the door is unlocked.  This figure's from Epictetus and he had the quitting of life in view.  But the same holds for the quitting of philosophy.  Just do it, if that's what you want.  It can be done.

What cannot be done, however, is to justify one's exit.  (That would be like copulating your way to chastity.)  For any justification proffered, perforce & willy-nilly, will be just more philosophy.  You cannot have it both ways.  You either walk away or stay.

(Exercise for the reader: Cite chapter and verse of the Epictetus and Wittgenstein passages to which I allude above.)

The Philosopher as Rhinoceros

George Santayana, Character and Opinion in the United States (New York: Norton, 1967), p. 35:

So long as philosophy is the free pursuit of wisdom, it arises wherever men of character and penetration, each with his special experience or hobby, looks about them in this world. That philosophers should be professors is an accident, and almost an anomaly. Free reflection about everything is a habit to be imitated, but not a subject to expound; and an original system, if the philosopher has one, is something dark, perilous, untested, and not ripe to be taught, nor is there much danger that anyone will learn it. The genuine philosopher — as Royce liked to say, quoting the Upanishads — wanders alone like the rhinoceros.

Is it any wonder that Santayana quit his teaching job at Harvard and spent the rest of his life in retirement in Rome?

The difference between a philosopher and a professor of philosophy is the former lives for what the latter lives from.

The History of Philosophy as Akin to an Intellectual Arms Race

Nicholas Rescher, The Strife of Systems: An Essay on the Grounds and Implications of Philosophical Diversity (University of Pittsburg Press, 1985), pp. 205-206:

The history of philosophy is akin to an intellectual arms race where all sides escalate the technical bases for their positions.  As realists sophisticate their side of the argument, idealists sophisticate their counterarguments; as materialists become more subtle, so do phenomenalists, and so on.  At the level of basics, the same old positions continue to contest the field — albeit that ever more powerful weapons are used to defend increasingly sophisticated positions.

The context is an argument for the thesis that philosophy is susceptible of technical but not doctrinal progress.  The nature of philosophy precludes consensus.  Resolution of "the substantive issues in such as way as to secure general approbation and assent" (206) is out of the question. Such consensus is impossible and therefore not even an ideal.

Strife of Systems is essential reading for anyone interested in metaphilosophy.

Why Philosophical Problems are Important

Philosophical problems are genuine intellectual knots that show us our intellectual exigency.  They humble us, whence their importance.  They rub our noses in the infirmity of reason.  The central problems are genuine and important but humanly insoluble. That is what two millenia of philosophical experience, East and West, teaches.  Their genuineness is wrongly denied by the Ordinary Language crowd; their spiritual importance by most analytic puzzle-solvers; their absolute insolubility by the optimistic pure theory types.

A Farewell to the Philosophy of Religion? Why not a Farewell to Philosophy?

Steven Nemes  informs me that Keith Parsons is giving up teaching and writing in the philosophy of religion.  His reasons are stated in his post Goodbye to All That.  The following appears to be his chief reason:

I have to confess that I now regard “the case for theism” as a fraud and I can no longer take it seriously enough to present it to a class as a respectable philosophical position—no more than I could present intelligent design as a legitimate biological theory. BTW, in saying that I now consider the case for theism to be a fraud, I do not mean to charge that the people making that case are frauds . . . .  I just cannot take their arguments seriously any more, and if you cannot take something seriously, you should not try to devote serious academic attention to it.

John Beversluis is also quitting:

Keith [Parsons] and I have emailed about getting out of the philosophy of religion. I've made the same decision. I'm through wasting my time trying to convince people who don't want to be convinced of the irrationality of their beliefs. And I have had more than enough verbal abuse from the Richard Purtills, the Peter Kreefts, and the Thomas Talbotts. We are all getting older and I, for my part, would much rather read books I want to read (or reread) and listen to great music that I either don't know or want to know better. Not to mention, spending more time with my wife instead of constantly yielding to the lure of the computer to work on yet another project that will convince few, antagonize some, and be ignored by most. Interestingly, Keith and I came to this conclusion more or less simultaneously but independently.

Steven Nemes comments in his e-mail to me:

I don't imagine you think the case for theism is so bad . . . . Any arguments in particular you think are promising? Any anti-theistic arguments you think are particularly good, too? (It was Parsons who said that the case for atheism/naturalism has been presented about as well as it ever can be by philosophers like Michael Martin, Schellenberg, Oppy, Gale, et al.)

Or perhaps you don't think the issues are so clear and obvious one way or the other in the philosophy of religion? In fact, is such dismissive hand-waving like Parsons' and Beversluis' ever acceptable in philosophy? Are there any issues that are settled?

Steven has once again peppered me with some pertinent and challenging questions.  Here is a quick response.

Of course, I don't consider the case for theism to be a "fraud," to use Parson's word. I also don't understand how the case could be called a fraud if the people who make it are not frauds.  But let's not enter into an analysis of the concept fraud.  We may charitably chalk up Parsons' use of 'fraud' to rhetorical overkill, which is certainly not a censurable offense in the blogosphere.  And when Parsons tells us that he cannot take the theistic arguments seriously any more, he is presumably not making a merely autobiographical remark.  He is not merely informing us about his present disgusted state of mind, although he is doing that.  He is asserting  that the case for theism is not intellectually respectable, while the case for atheism and naturalism (which Parsons in his post brackets together) are intellectually respectable.  (It is worth noting that while nauralism entails atheism, atheism does not entail naturalism: McTaggart was an atheist but not a naturalist.  But this nuance needn't concern us at present.)

Parsons' metaphilosophical assertion does not impress me.  I make a different assertion:  There are intellectually respectable cases to be made both for theism/anti-naturalism and for atheism/naturalism.  I don't think there are any 'knock-down' arguments on either side.  There are arguments for the existence of God, but no proofs of the existence of God.  And there are arguments for  the nonexistence of God, but no proofs of the nonexistence of God.  But of course it depends on what is meant by 'proof.'

I suggest that a proof is a deductive argument, free of informal fallacy, valid in point of logical form, all of the premises of which are objectively self-evident. I will illustrate what I mean by 'objectively self-evident' with an anecdote.   In a discussion with a Thomist a while back  I mentioned that the first premise of his reconstruction of Aquinas' argument from motion (the First of the Five Ways) was not (objectively) self-evident, and that therefore the First Way did not amount to a proof.  The premise in the reconstruction was to the effect that it is evident to the senses that the reduction of potency to act  is a real feature of the world.

I granted to my interlocutor  that what Thomas calls motion, i.e., change, is evident to the senses as a real feature of the world.  But I pointed out that it is not evident to the senses that the actualization of potency is a real feature of the world.  That change is the reduction of potency to act is a theoretical claim that goes beyond what is given to sense perception.  For this reason, the first premise of the reconstruction of the First Way, though plausible and indeed reasonable, is not objectively self-evident.  One can of course give many logically correct arguments for the Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysics, but we can ask with respect to the premises of these arguments whether they are objectively self-evident.  If they are not, then they do not amount to proofs given my stringent definition of 'proof.'

It is equally true, however, that one cannot prove the nonexistence of God, from evil say. 

But it is no different outside the philosophy of religion.  God and the soul are meta-physical in the sense of supersensible.  But there is nothing supersensible about the bust of Beethoven sitting atop my CD player.  It is a material object, a middle-sized artifact, open to unaided perception.  But such a humble object inspires interminable and seemingly intractable debate among the most brilliant philosophers.  I am currently exploring some of these issues in other threads, and so I won't go into details here.  But consider Peter van Inwagen's denial of the existence of artifacts (which is part of a broader denial of the existence of all nonliving composite objects).  You could say, very loosely, that van Inwagen is an 'atheist' about artifacts. Other philosophers, equally brilliant and well-informed, deny his denial. 

Now it would take an excess of chutzpah to label van Inwagen's carefully argued denial of artifacts as intellectually unrespectable.  I suggest that it takes an equal excess of chutzpah to label the case for theism intellectually unrespectable.

Steven asked me whether the dismissive attitude of Parsons and Beversluis is acceptable.  I would say no.  It is no more acceptable in the philosophy of religion than it is in other branches of philosophy where there are equally genuine but equally difficult and interminably discussable problems.

Let me end with this question:  If one's reason for abandoning the philosophy of religion is that one cannot convince those on the other side — "I'm through wasting my time trying to convince people who don't want to be convinced of the irrationality of their beliefs." (Beversluis) — then is this not also a reason for abandoning philosophy tout court?  After all, the brilliant van Inwagen did not convince the brilliant David Lewis that the latter was wrong about Composition as Identity — and this is a very well-defined and mundane and ideology-free question.

 

Existence, Elimination,and Changing the Subject

This is the fourth in a series on the metaphilosophical problem of sorting out the differences and similarities of analysis, identification, reduction, elimination, and cognate notions.  Parts I, II, III.  This post features existence, a topic I find endlessly fascinating and inexhaustibly rich.

Consider the position of a philosopher I will call Gottbert Fressell.  (A little known fact about him is that in his spare time he writes pro-capitalist novels under the pseudonym 'Randlob Ruge.') Fressell intends a reductionist line about existence.   He maintains that

1. There is (the property of) existence, but what this property is is the property of being instantiated.

This is a reductionist line because our philosopher admits that while there is existence, it can be reductively identified with something better understood, namely, the second-level property of being instantiated.  But I say that despite Fressell's intentions, his position is in truth an eliminativist one.  Thus I maintain that (1) collapses willy-nilly into

2.  There is no (property of) existence.

So if Fressell understood the implications of what he is saying, he would come out of the closet and forthrightly declare himself an existence denier, a denier that there is any such 'property' as existence.  And if he understood his position he would plead 'guilty' to the charge of having changed the subject.

The subject is existence, that in virtue of which me, you, and the moon exist, are, have Being, are not nothing — however you want to put it.  Existence is what Russell has (speaking tenselessly) but his celestial teapot lacks.  The subject is singular existence, the existence of non-instantiable items, the existence of that which I prove when I enact the Cogito.   But what Fressell does is change the subject to what could be called general existence, which is just the being-instantiated of first-level properties.

Note the difference between 'Mungojerrie exists' and 'Cats exist.'  The latter, but not the former, can be reasonably understood as predicating a second-level property (the property of beng instantiated) of a first-level property, the property of being a cat.  Thus 'Cats exist' is analyzable as 'The property of being a cat has instances.'  But 'Mungojerrie exists' cannot be analyzed as 'The property of being identical to Mungojerrie is instantiated' because there is no such haecceity property.  But even if there were, the analysis would fail due to circularity.  If you want to explain what it is for individual a to exist, you move in an explanatory circle of embarrassingly short diameter if you say that the existence of a is a's instantiation of a-ness: a's existence is logically prior to its instantiation of any property. 

If you say that general existence is instantiation, then I have no quarrel with you.  But 'general existence' is a misleading expression with which we can easily dispense by using in its stead 'the property of being instantiated.'  General existence, if you  insist on the phrase, presupposes singular existence.  And because 'general existence' is dispensable, we don't need the qualifier 'singular': existence just is singular existence. If, having understood all of this, you insist that existence is instantiation, then I say you are an eliminativist about existence who has changed the subject from existence to instantiation.

Exercise for the reader:  find more examples of changing the subject in philosophy.  Replacing truth with warranted assertibility would be an example, as would replacing knowledge by what passes for knowledge in a given society (a move some sociologists of knowledge make).