Category: Substack

Galen Strawson on God

Substack latest. Does the fact of evil render the nonexistence of God certain?

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Tony Flood comments:

A good one, Bill. Bahnsen held that atheists, having no reason for affirming an absolute moral standard (which evil offends) can't even frame a problem of evil. He also held that the classic argument you summarized is missing a premise: God could not have a morally sufficient reason for permitting evil. (That He hasn't shared it with us is neither here nor there.) If He does, however, the argument doesn't go through. What atheist has even attempted to argue for it? 

The Introvert Advantage

Currently atop  the Substack pile.  With a little help from Kafka, Heidegger, Schopenhauer, and Einstein.

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Thomas writes (12/29),

A very nice note for the (nearly) new year. It took me decades to realise I am one of those who was nearly socially self-sufficient all his life – no school yard bullying ever touched me, although I was one of the shorter ones until I grew late. And I had no problem concentrating, reading and creating (a few) new ideas in my work for hours on end (indeed, for years on end), whereas I find most people never ever perform such simple feats even once in their lives – concentrating and writing for 4 – 8 hours? How do you do it? How do you not do it, I reply . . .
 
It takes a long time for me to understand the difference because of course we all think we are the same inside until we inspect some bit of human behaviour and find differences. One difference is: socially reliant people have no mental resilience. They can't deal with difficulties on their own. Therefore in crisis situations, which often occur in social groups reacting to wider events, most people determine their responses in a miasma of fear and group-think – a guarantee of poor quality outcomes. So the socially self-sufficient nearly always under-estimate the state of constant frustration (due to non-achievement) and anxiety (when no idle chat or other filler activity is available) of others. So we are amazed when society takes the turns it does. We are exceptionally ignorant, until we study mental lassitude scientifically!
 
Your whisky aphorism has it right. We do need a bit. After all, wit (in the esprit sense) partly comes from talk. And the Kafka quote: responding to corns should just be done, not heard, while one is actually thinking about or discussing things of import, or at least containing some wit.
 
But perhaps there is something to mindless chat? Maybe it serves a purpose such as to limit social violence, in the same way that greeting others (in European culture at least) with a kiss on both cheeks probably (?) limits fist-swinging, at least for that day. I have no idea.
 
Good points.  I never thought of describing extroverts as 'socially reliant,' but the characterization fits.  This 'social reliance' makes them suggestible and inclines them toward conformism, group-think, and foolish fads such as buccal fat removal. But of course we are social animals whether we like it or not. No man an island, etc. 
 
A little socializing is good even unto a bit of mindless chit-chat. Women as a group are extremely good at this and we introverted males can learn from them. The trick, however, is not to take what the other person says seriously. I have made the following mistake. I am hiking along and I meet someone who says, "Beautiful weather we're having today!" I reply, "Well, it's overcast and a bit windy, so I wouldn't call it beautiful."  That's a social mistake or faux pas (a double-entendre to keep with the hiking theme) because the other guy was probably just signaling friendliness or harmlessness or something. He had no intention of conveying a meteorological truth.  In situations like this the introvert who was thinking about the third derivative of position with respect to time has to turn off his truth-drive and go with the silly-ass flow. And not be a jerk.
 
Strangely, I have found that a little socializing is often physically stimulating.  On an early morning ramble, I am doing OK, but feeling a bit sluggish.  I encounter an acquaintance. We chat for a few minutes. When I start up again I feel energized. There's a spring in my step and  glide to my stride.  
 
And now my mind drifts back to a book I read as a teenager, Games People Play, by Eric Berne. He was pushing something he called "transactional analysis" if memory serves. Look it up.
 
To end with the whisky metaphor. If one shot is good, ten shots is not ten times better.

A Battle of Titans

Substack upload.

It is sometimes said that there are only two kinds of philosophers, Platonists and Aristotelians.  What follows is a quotation from Heinrich Heine which expresses one version of this useful simplification.  Carl Gustav Jung places it at the very beginning of his Psychological Types (Princeton UP, 1971, p. 2. Jung does not properly source the Heine quotation.)

Tom and Van: A Tale of Two Idealists

Top of the Substack stack.

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Tony Flood comments (12/23):

This was enjoyable on so many levels. There's irony in labeling these gents "idealists" (I know the sense in which you meant it) since Marxists considered theists like Merton metaphysical "idealists," but and how could any mathematician, even a Marxist one, be anything but an idealist when it comes to the reality of numbers? Your historical vignette is rich and your comparison and contrasts apt. 

I know that Karl Marx occupied himself with the foundations of analysis (calculus), but I don't know whether or not he wrote anything about the philosophy of mathematics.  To answer Tony's question with a question: Why couldn't a Marxist take a nominalist tack and simply deny the existence of numbers and other mathematical items?

Tony replies (12/24):

"Why couldn't a Marxist take a nominalist tack and simply deny the existence of numbers and other mathematical items?"

Abstractly, Bill, I have no idea what tack Marxist materialists might take if pressed about the reality of numbers, e.g., what (and "where") they are (Plato's problem); how they're "unreasonably effective" in the natural sciences, which Marxists revere, i.e., how numbers can cause mathematical belief (Benacerraf's problem); and how numbers are knowable on the materialist/naturalist terms to which Marxists subscribe, i.e., what neural process could possibly answer to the perception of a mathematical object (Goedel's problem). I wish I could have asked Stalinist mathematician Dirk Struik (1896-2000) these questions when he and I were comrades, but I wasn't asking them then. (I'm not asking them these days, but your question stimulated memories of when I did.) Nominalism is not an integral way out for Marxists, but what grounds Marxists have for valuing integral solutions, I have no idea. 

Thanks for the Wigner pdf. It gets at a question that fascinated me when I was a student of electrical engineering at the end of the 'sixties.  How is it that the theory of complex numbers — developed a priori in response to a purely theoretical question about the roots of negative integers — finds application in alternating current theory? 

I say 'developed,' Wigner says 'invented.' "The principal emphasis [in mathematics] is on the invention of concepts. Mathematics would soon run out of interesting theorems if these had to be formulated in terms of the concepts which already appear in the axioms." I wrote 'developed' because of my platonizing tendency to view mathematical entities — 'entities' betrays me too inasmuch as it begs the question I am about to pose –  as discovered rather than invented. The question that my use of 'entities' begs is precisely the question whether mathematical 'items' — a colorless, non-question-begging bit of terminology — are made up by us (in which case they cannot be called entities or beings) or are really but non-spatially 'out there' in Plato's topos ouranios. My platonic drift links up with my classical theism and issues in the view that the unspeakably vast actual infinity of mathematical items are accusatives of divine awareness: their Being is their being-known/created by the archetypal intellect.  This sort of view allows for the mediation of two extremes, a synthesis if you will.

Thesis: math items exist in themselves in splendid independence of ectypal intellects (whether human, Martian, angelic, whatever). Antithesis: math items do no such thing; they are the conceptual/linguistic fabrications of ectypal intellects such as ours. And now my mind drifts back to Hartry Field's nominalistic Science without Numbers, circa 1980,  the gist of which is that science can be done without ontological commitment to any so-called abstract entities.  There are some very smart nominalists  and they are hard to beat. Shooting from the hip, I say Field  'out-quines' Quine.

But here's a thought. Suppose Wigner is right and mathematica are inventions by us, which is to say that they are conceptual/linguistic fabrications that do not refer to anything real anywhere, whether in Plato's heaven or on Aristotle's earth. Would that not make the problem of the applicability of mathematics to the physical world utterly insoluble?

There is a Kantian-type solution, but then you have to take on board the Kantian baggage.  

It looks like I have, willy-nilly this Christmas eve, added a log to my aporetic fire in support of my metaphilosophical thesis that the central problems of philosophy, though obviously meaningful, pace the later Ludwig, are all of them absolutely insoluble by intellects of our constitution. Insofar forth, I am mightily impressed by the thesis of the infirmity of reason. The Fall had noetic consequences.

Below: Raphael, The School of Athens depicting Plato gesturing upwards, as if to the mundus intelligibilis and Aristotle downwards as if to the mundus sensibilis.

Athens School of Raphael

Relativism and Dogmatism

Substack latest

My Substack snowball is getting bigger and bigger. Time to monetize? Well, it's a labor of love and I've got enough loot to last me my sublunary tenure, assuming the Dementocrat destruction of the economy is kept within certain bounds. 

I believe that Enough is Enough when it comes to material stuff. Whatever we are here for, we are not here to pile up loot and land. You have heard it said that in the end a man needs only six feet. And not even that if the crematorium is his body's last stop.

On the other hand, as foibled as we are psychologically, people tend to value more what they pay for. And if they are paying, then they may pay closer attention 'to get their money's worth.'

Or maybe they think like this: "This guy gives away his content for free; he must not think it is worth much."

On the third hand, If I sell a product, then I am in thrall to my customers and must cater to their wants and desires. This thrall thwarts my independence. I'm big on the latter. 

So you can expect my articles to stay free, free for me and free for thee.