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I was surprised, but pleased, to see that the late Lawrence Auster, traditionalist conservative, photo to the left, 1973, had a deep appreciation and a wide-ranging knowledge of Dylan's art.  Born in 1949, Auster is generationally situated for that appreciation, and as late as '73 was still flying the '60s colors, if we can go by the photo, but age is at best only a necessary condition for digging Dylan.  Auster's Jewishness may play a minor role, but the main thing is Auster's attunement to Dylan's particularism.  See the quotation below.  Herewith, some Dylan songs with commentary by Auster.

This from a reader:

It would be very interesting to hear your take on Trump — why do you think that his leadership of the country, despite obvious personality flaws, is less risky for the US and the world than a reasonable alternative? Yes, the ideological, thoughtless, and totalitarian far-left is dangerous, but isn't unprincipled, pugilistic and me-and-my-family first leadership any better? Is your thinking driven by "the lesser of two (or three) evils"?

Merry Christmas everybody.  Pour yourself a drink, and enjoy.  Me, I'm nursing a Boulevardier.  It's a Negroni with cojones: swap out the gin for bourbon.  One ounce bourbon, one ounce sweet vermouth, one ounce Campari, straight up or on the rocks, with a twist of orange.  A serious libation.  It'll melt a snowflake for sure. The vermouth rosso contests the harshness of the bourbon, but then the Campari joins the fight on the side of the bourbon. 

Or you  can think of it as a Manhattan wherein the Campari substitutes for the angostura bitters.  That there are people who don't like Campari shows that there is no hope for humanity.

 

As a sort of intro, The Who, My Generation. "I hope I die before I get old." My English readers will enjoy the video.

Charlie Watts at 80, 1941-2021. Rolling Stones, Sittin' on a Fence. A lovely tune. Trigger warning!  Under My Thumb. Eerily appropriate these days: Gimme Shelter

Don Everly at 84, 1937-2021. When Will I Be Loved?

Nanci Griffith at 68, 1953-2021. Boots of Spanish Leather. Bob would be proud.

B. J. Thomas at 78, 1942-2021. I Just Can't Help Believing

Lloyd Price at 88, 1933-2021. Stagger Lee. Personality

Chick Corea at 79, 1941-2021. Armando's Rhumba

Mary Wilson at 76, 1944-2021. Our Day Will Come

Jimmie Rodgers at 87. 1933-2021. Honeycomb

Phil Spector at 81, 1939-2021.  The Wall of Sound

Charley Pride at 82, 1938-2021. 

Len Barry at 78, 1942-2020. You Can't Sit Down

Jerry Jeff Walker at 78, 1942-2020. Mr. Bojangles

Spencer Davis at 81, 1939-2020. Gimme Some Lovin'

Returning to the ongoing thread:

So to summarise the discussion so far. The doctrine of Reference and Identity is that empty names can refer. That is because the verb phrase ‘refers to’ is intentional. That is, “S refers to N” is consistent with “there is no such thing as N”. Contrast with “S touches N” which implies there is such a thing as N.

[. . .]

Do you see any problem with that position?

When you say, "empty names can refer," do you mean that some empty names refer and some empty names do not refer? Or do you mean that all empty names refer? (Compare: If I said that integers can be either odd or even, that would be equivalent to saying that  some integers are odd and some are even.)

I will assume that you mean that all empty names refer.  You say that this is because 'refers to' is intentional. It is intentional in the very same way that thinking-of is intentional. To think is to think of something. But 'A thinks of  N' is logically consistent with 'there is no such thing as N.'  If I am thinking of Asmodeus, it does not follow that I am thinking of something that exists.  So far, so good. Now I take it that you hold that the following are all logically equivalent where the substituends for 'N' are proper names such as 'Moses' and 'Asmodeus.' 

• There is no such thing as N
• There exists no such thing as N
• It is not the case that there exists an x such that x = N
• It is not the case that some existing thing is identical to N
• It is not the case that something is identical to N
• No existing thing is identical to N
• Nothing is identical to N
• N is not a member of the class K of existing things.
• N is not a member of class K of things.  

You are making the following additional assumptions. Everything exists. (Quine contra 'Wyman.') 'Is' and 'exists' have the same sense. 'Existential quantifier' and 'particular quantifier' are two different names for one and the same quantifier.  'N does not exist' says just this: it is not the case that something is identical to N.

Your view implies a contradiction:

1) Empty names such as 'Asmodeus' refer. (R & I, 9-10)

2) To refer is to refer to something. (R & I, 9-10)

Therefore

3) 'Asmodeus' refers to something. (As you explicitly state, ibid.)

4) In the case of 'Asmodeus,' an empty name, 'Asmodeus'  refers to something that does not exist.

5) Everything exists.  (There are no nonexistent things. 'Something does not exist' is contradictory.)

Therefore

6) 'Asmodeus' refers to nothing.  (3, 4, 5)

Therefore

7) (3) and (6) are contradictories.

Therefore

8) One of your assumptions is false. 

For Cyrus

"I believe in . . . the resurrection of the body and life everlasting." Thus ends the Apostles' Creed. Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI) addresses the meaning of this article of faith on pp. 347-359 of his Introduction to Christianity (Ignatius Press, 2004). The book first appeared in German in 1968 long before Ratzinger became Pope.  Herewith, some interpretive notes and commentary.

1) Despite the undeniable Platonic elements in Christianity, to which Ratzinger is sensitive, the Biblical promise of immortality pertains to the whole man, not to a separated soul. Some, Lutherans in particular, recoiling from Platonic soul-body dualism, have gone so far as to maintain that the Greek doctrine of the immortality of the soul is positively un-Christian. (347) This is going too far. It is clear, though, that on Christianity a man is not in his innermost essence a pure spirit like an angel; he is, by nature, a corporeal, embodied  being whose ultimate good is to live forever in an embodied, not an angelic, state.  'By nature' implies that we are not accidentally embodied, as on Platonism, but essentially embodied.

2) On the other hand, the idea of immortal (living) bodies, immortal animals, seems utterly absurd given what we know about the natural world, as Ratzinger admits (348).  Schopenhauer mocks this notion as immortality mit Haut und Haar, with skin and hair.  By contrast, the notion of human immortality as the immortality of a simple (metaphysically incomposite) soul substance is not absurd but defensible, even if not Christian. 

So we face a problem. Platonic dualism cannot do justice to our  unitary corporeal nature. It involves an ontological denigration of the body and of materiality in general.  The material world, however, created by God, is good, and not to be flown from in Platonic-Plotinian-gnostic fashion.  The body is not the prison-house of the soul, but something rather more positive: its necessary expression or realization.  But how on earth could the living bodies of humans live forever?

3) One solution that suggests itself  — call it the additive solution — is to add the Biblical notion of bodily resurrection to the Platonic notion of soulic immortality. When you die, soul and body separate: the soul continues to exist while the body returns to dust. ("Remember man, thou art dust, and unto dust thou shalt return . . .")  At the end of the world, the dead are raised and soul is reunited with its body, the same one it had on Earth, although presumably spiritualized and transformed or transfigured.  Although Ratzinger does not cite Aquinas in the stretch of text I am commenting on, the Angelic Doctor's view is additive.

On this view, (i) resurrection is resurrection of the (human) body, not of the whole man, and (ii) this resurrected body will be numerically identical to the body that lived and died on Earth. In other words, the pre-mortem and post-mortem bodies of a resurrected person are one and the same.  After the resurrection you will have the very same body that you have now. This is compatible with the resurrected body being property-wise different from the earthly body.   I take this same-body view to be the traditional view. We find it, for example, in Aquinas:

For we cannot call it resurrection unless the soul return to the same body, since resurrection is a second rising, and the same thing rises that falls; therefore resurrection regards the body which after death falls, rather than the soul which after death lives. And consequently if it is not the same body which the soul resumes, it will not be a resurrection, but rather the assuming of a new body. (1952, 952, quoted from here)

For the sake of concretion, let's assume the Aristotelian hylomorphic dualism of Aquinas according to which a human being is a composite of soul and body where the soul is the form of the body. For Aquinas, the soul continues to exist after the body ceases to exist, and resurrection is the uniting of that soul with its body, not some body or other, but its body, the same one it had on Earth, although perfected, subtilized, spiritualized, and rendered free of defects.

4) The Thomistic synthesis of the Greek and the Biblical is an uneasy one, fraught with difficulties. I'll mention just one.  On the Platonic view, salvation is salvation of the soul from the body; it is not the salvation of the whole, undivided, man.  The soul is a naturally immortal spiritual substance** that comes into its own only when freed from the evil predicament of embodiment.   Death, as separation of soul from body, is release and therefore something good.  The Biblical conception is very different: death is not good, but bad: the fitting punishment for Adam's sin. Death is not a welcome release from the material world, but the calamity of all calamities. We were intended by God to live forever in Paradise in an embodied, material form. But Adam (man) fell, and is now subject to sickness, old age, and death in a material world that is itself fallen and in which demonic agents are at play in various ways.

Now suppose you are a philosopher and a Christian who wants to find a way to accommodate man's essential corporeality. Following Aristotle, you bring Plato's Forms down to Earth where they cease to be substances in their own right and become factors in the ontological analysis of such sublunary substances (prote ousiai) as statues, horses — and humans.  Socrates, then, is not a naturally immortal soul accidentally attached to a perishable body, but a hylomorphic compound of form and (proximate) matter in which  anima forma corporis, the soul is the form of the body. 

The soul, which was a substance for Plato becomes in Aristotle a non-substantial 'principle' invoked in the analysis of genuine substances.  The I that thinks when Socrates thinks is then presumably not his soul but the whole man, the entire hylomorphic compound. That which thinks when Socrates thinks is Socrates, not the form of his body. For how could an enmattered form think?  How could it be the subject of thinking (of cogitationes in the broad Cartesian sense)? An enmattered form is a respect in which a sublunary substance is intelligible, but it is not intelligent, being merely one factor in the ontological analysis of a whole man who is the one doing the thinking.   A subject of thinking must be a substance, and on the Aristotelian analysis, the soul is not a substance but a form.

Might it be, contrary to what I have just maintained, that the soul is an enmattered form that is both intelligible and intelligent? If so, then the soul-form is what I refer to when I thoughtfully deploy the first-person singular pronoun, and not the whole man, body-cum-soul.  This seems to lead us back to the view according to which I am identical to my soul, and away from the Aristotelico-Thomist view according to which I am not identical to my soul, but identical to a composite of soul and body.

To state the problem succinctly, Thomas is an Aristotelian on Earth, but a Platonist in heaven, and he has to be both to satisfy simultaneously the exigencies of both Christianity and Aristotle. But the exigencies are in tension one with the other, a tension tantamount to contradiction. Thomas qua Christian needs a substantial soul capable of surviving bodily death, a soul that then 'waits' for its completion in the resurrection of the body.  Qua Aristotelian, however, the soul must be a form and not a substance.  The upshot is a contradictory construct: a form that is and is not a substance.  A soul-form which is not a substance but a principle when embodied,  becomes a substance on its own after death.

5) Ratzinger rejects the additive approach to resurrection. A restored body is not added to a post-mortem soul.  For "the biblical train of thought . . . presupposes the undivided unity of man." (349) Scripture speaks of "the awakening of the dead, not of bodies!" (349)  The "real heart of the faith in resurrection does not consist at all in the restoration of bodies . . . ." (349)  Man is not composed of body and soul with the soul the carrier of his immortality. If you start with that conception, then resurrection becomes the restoration of bodies, which are then added onto the souls which have been waiting  for their bodily completion. This scheme is precisely what Ratzinger is opposing. So how does he propose that we understand resurrection?

6) He speaks of a "dialogic immortality" that is an "awakening."(350) Man cannot "totally perish because he is known and loved by God." (350)  As against Platonism, there is nothing in man that is indestructible.  Man is saved from annihilation by being drawn into dialogue with the Creator. In this way the whole man, not just his soul, is awakened and brought to life.

From here on out the discussion tapers off into vagueness.  Resurrection is not a restoration of one's earthly body. The person "goes on existing because it lives in God's memory." (353)  To go on existing as a merely intentional object of someone's memory, even of God's, seems insufficient. I remember my mother, but does she live on in my memory? Such an afterlife would be a paltry thing indeed, and not just because my memories of her are both incomplete and in some respect erroneous.  The main problem is that an object of memory cannot be by being remembered be transformed from a non-living subject into a living one.  My memory cannot be constitutive of your subjectivity. But perhaps with God it is different . . . .

_______________________

*While man is not a pure spirit, the Christian worldview admits the existence of  finite pure spirits, namely angels and demons (fallen angels). Christianity is therefore not a materialist worldview: it does not hold that finite intelligence cannot occur except as physically realized or materially embodied. And of course God himself, the infinite, archetypal spirit, is a pure spirit, fully real, and fully concrete, despite being wholly immaterial.  Christianity is not materialism, but it does, in the teeth of Platonism, valorize the material world.

**An individual substance is definable as anything metaphysically capable of independent existence.

A Substack rumination over a Brunton observation.

We have seen that and how Lowe reduces property change to existential change. The latter is the change that occurs when something comes into existence and passes out of existence.  What of the reverse reduction, the reduction of existential change to property change?  What are its prospects?   Could we say that when an individual substance (an individual, for short) comes to exist it does so by acquiring the property of existence, and that when it passes out of existence it loses this property? This notion is fraught with difficulties which I will not rehearse. Lowe, like many philosophers, rejects the idea that existence is a first-level property, a property of individuals.

So what then is it for an object to exist, if not to possess the property of existing? Some philosophers would answer: It is for it to be the case that something is (identical with) that object. The contention, in other words, is that . . . 'E!a' ('a exists') is equivalent in meaning to '∃x(x = a).' ("How Real is Substantial Change," The Monist, vol. 89, no. 3 (2006), pp. 275-293, 277)

I deny that the expressions have the same meaning, but I cheerfully accept their logical equivalence. (Logical equivalence is equivalence across all broadly logically possible worlds. It is the necessitation of material equivalence.) I concede that, for example,

1) Necessarily, Max exists iff Max is identical to something.

'Something' here is elliptical for 'something or other.'  The idea is not that each thing that exists exists iff it is identical to some one thing; that would lead straightaway to an intolerable monism. The idea is that each thing exists iff it is self-identical.  Unless one is a Meinongian, one will accept as true all biconditionals of the form of (1).   Lowe continues:

One way to express this idea is to say that the predicate 'exists' in fact expresses or denotes a second-level property, that is, a property of first-level properties: to wit, the property of having at least one instance. Thus, it may be said, 'a exists' expresses the thought that the property of being identical with a has at least one instance . . . . (277)

There are at least two problems with this view that Lowe sees and that I have mentioned many times before. First, there are no haecceity properties.  For example, there is no such property as Socrateity, the property of being identical with Socrates.  Second, even if there is the property, identity-with-a, a's existence cannot be explained by saying that the haecceity property has an instance. This is because identity-with-a, or a-ness, cannot have an instance unless the instance exists.  One moves in an explanatory circle of embarrassingly short diameter if one maintains that for a to exist is for a-ness to be instantiated when a-ness cannot be instantiated unless a exists. I therefore agree with Lowe:

. . . the notion of an object's existing seems to be more basic than that of a (first-level) property's having an instance, whence the former notion cannot really be explained in terms of the latter. (277)

Seems? Nay, 'tis! The upshot for Lowe and me is that existence can be neither a first-level nor a second-level property.  Lowe concludes that existence is not a property at all. A property, whether it is a universal or a trope (mode), is an entity within the totality of entities. But neither existence nor identity "figure in an ontological inventory of the entities that reality as a whole comprehends." (278)  So existence is not one of the things that exists. Existence does not exist, as it would if it were a property. Existence is not a property, but a concept, a "formal ontological concept." Such concepts do not "pick out beings or entities of any sort." (278)  What's more, existence is a "primitive" and "indefinable" concept.  It cannot be analyzed in terms of more basic concepts.

But now trouble looms.  I quoted Lowe above: "what then is it for an object to exist?" An excellent question! He rightly rejects two answers. The first is that an object exists in virtue of possessing the first-level property of existence. The second is that an object exists in virtue of the instantiation of its haecceity property. Lowe concludes that existence is not something that exists in reality, an item that would have to be listed in an adequate ontological inventory.  Objects exist, but existence does not exist. So he says that existence is a concept, and indeed a "primitive" and "indefinable" one.

But if existence is indefinable, then it cannot be explicated in terms of temporal presentness, which is plainly what Lowe is attempting to do.  Every presentism maintains, at least with respect to items in time, that only temporally present items exist simpliciter.  For Lowe, the items include objects and their tropes, but not times and events.  But no matter: he answers his own question by maintaining that for an object to exist is for an object to be temporally present.

But if existence is not a property, then neither is temporal presentness.  Temporal presentness is time itself. For what is past is nothing, having been annihilated, and what is future is also nothing, not having been created. Time, in turn, is temporal passage. Temporal passage is real, objective, mind-independent. Temporal passage "consists in the continual coming into and going out of existence of entities . . . ." ("Presentism and Relativity," 137)  Lowe insists more than once that the italicized phrases be taken seriously and literally: what passes out of existence is absolutely annihilated.  The wholly past is nothing.

Well, what is this existence into which things come and out of which they go? It cannot be a concept. It cannot be subjective. It is not something we add to the world; it is the world itself in its temporal reality. Existence, existing, is some sort of metaphysical process, an ongoing upsurge of the Now and of Being, a continual Presencing that combines the temporal sense of 'presence' with the existential sense.   This seems to be the root metaphor that underlies Lowe's presentist vision of time and existence: a continual upsurge of presencing.  Of course, sober analyst that he is, Lowe would not use such romantic language as I am now using, language reminscent of a Continental philosopher like Sartre.

So, while existence is not an existent among existents, existence in the end does exist as this primal Presencing.  There is a structural similarity with the view I arrived at in my A Paradigm Theory of Existence (Kluwer, 2002): both Lowe and I think of existence in its difference from existence as a paradigm Existent. In the end, existence exists for both of us, but not as a property or any existent among existents. It is logically and ontologically prior to the Quinian inventory.

In general, no. For you may be foolish or ignorant or otherwise incompetent with respect to the subject matter under discussion. Or you may be morally defective: a bully, a blowhard, a bullshitter, a quibbler, a sophist. But suppose none of these predicates attach to you.  Suppose you are my moral and intellectual peer, and what's more, a competent practitioner in the discipline or sub-discipline which is home to the thesis we are disputing. Thus we are both competent, and we are equally competent. And suppose I believe you to be as intellectually honest and as competent as I am.

Suppose further that I have given careful thought to my thesis and have advanced it in respectable, peer-reviewed journals.

If you disagree with me, does this fact supply a good reason for me to question my thesis?  Ought I question it? Or would I be justified in ignoring your disagreement?

We note that this is a meta-question that sires a meta-disagreement.  This meta-disagreement is between the Conciliationist and the Steadfaster.

I am a Conciliationist. Or at least that is my natural tendency.  Thus I tend to think that your disagreement with me (given the stipulations above) ought to give me pause. It ought to cause me to re-examine my view and be open to the possibility of either rejecting it or withholding assent from it.  It ought to undermine my epistemic self-confidence. I tend to think that I would be intellectually amiss, and less than intellectually honest, were I simply to dismiss your disagreement. I tend to think that I would be unjustifiably privileging my own point of view, preferring it to yours simply because is is mine. This seems wrong to me given that we are trying to arrive at the objective and impersonal truth.  Truth cannot be mine or yours.

The Steadfaster, however, stands fast in the face of disagreement. Whereas the Conciliationist allows the fact of disagreement to undermine his epistemic self-confidence, the Steadfaster takes the fact of disagreement to undermine his prior conviction that his interlocutor is as morally and intellectually capable as he initially thought he was. So when you disagree with me, I question whether I am right. But if  you are a Steadfaster, then, when I disagree with you, you question my competence, rationality, probity, etc.

But now a puzzle arises. If I am a Conciliationist, then my position would seem to require that I question my Conciliationism due to the fact that the Steadfaster disagrees with me on the meta-issue.   (Assume that the Steadfaster is as morally and intellectually well-endowed as I am and that I believe him to be such.)

It seems that the consistent Conciliationist cannot be steadfast in his Conciliationism given that there are Steadfasters out there who are, and whom he believes to be, his moral and intellectual equals.  So what should our Conciliationist do? Should he:

• Suspend judgment and neither affirm nor deny Conciliationism?
• Make an exception for the Conciliationist thesis itself by steadfastly adhering to it at the meta-level while remaining otherwise a Conciliationist?
• Reject Conciliationism and become a Steadfaster?
• Do something else?

1) Divide all entities into two mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive classes, the temporal and the atemporal. Temporal entities are 'in time,' while atemporal entities are not 'in time.' Caesar's crossing the Rubicon is in time; 7's being prime is not in time. 

2) Here are some temporal words: past, present, future, before, after, later, earlier, simultaneous.  We can define 'in time' as follows.  An item is in time iff a temporal word can be meaningfully predicated of it. Otherwise it is not in time. My definition is circular, but innocuously so. It is like the following which is also circular: X is possible =df X exists in at least one possible world.

"But doesn't 6 come after 5?" Yes in the normal order of counting. Counting, however, is a temporal process. The numbers themselves are not in time. 

"If a thing changes, then it is in time. The number 9 changed from being Tom's favorite number to being Tom's second favorite number. So numbers are in time."  But that's a mere Cambridge change; it doesn't count. 

3) Atemporal entities tenselessly exist and tenselessly have properties.  Everything timeless is tenseless. 

4) But can a temporal item tenselessly exist? This is the question we need to discuss. Mr Brightly in an earlier thread says No. Caesar is a wholly past individual, and obviously to be classified as temporal rather an atemporal. On Brightly's presentism, JC existed, but is now nothing. We of course agree that JC is no longer temporally present. He is a wholly past individual.  But I maintain that there is a sense in which he exists nonetheless.  I gave an argument earlier in response to Brightly.  Here is a new one.

ARGUMENT FROM THE UNIVOCITY OF 'EXIST(S)'

a) Both temporal and atemporal items exist.

b) Whatever exists exists in the same sense and in the same way: there are no different modes of existence such that timeless items exist in one way and time-bound items in another. 'Exist(s)' is univocal across all applications.

c) Atemporal items exist tenselessly.  Therefore:

d) Temporal items exist tenselessly. Therefore:

e) Julius Caesar and all wholly past items exist tenselessly despite being wholly past.

COMMENT

The main idea is that existence, by its very nature, is tenseless.  To exist is to exist tenselessly.  If so, then pastness, presentness, and futurity are purely temporal properties which, by themselves, imply nothing about existence. It follows that existence cannot be identified with temporal presentness.  Accordingly:

Dinosaurs existed but do not still exist just in case dinosaurs exist (tenselessly) AND they are wholly past.

Horses exist (present-tense) just in case horses exist (tenselessly) AND some of them are present.

Martian colonies will exist just in case Martian colonies exist (tenselessly) AND they are wholly future.

The idea is that existence is time-independent. When a thing exists has no bearing on whether it exists. 

Think of a spotlight that successively illuminates events in McTaggart's B-series (events ordered by the B-relations, i.e., earlier than, later than, simultaneous with.)  The events and the times at which they occur are all equally real, equally existent, and their existence is tenseless.  An illuminated event is a temporally present event.  So the spotlight once shone on the event of my birth rendering it present. But the spotlight moved on such that my birth became wholly past, but not nonexistent.

UPSHOT

I am not endorsing the above argument, nor am I endorsing the Spotlight Theory of Time.  My point against Brightly is that there is no contradiction in thinking of a temporal item as tenselessly existing.  The trick is to realize that existence needn't be thought of as time-dependent — even in the case of items in time.

Here

Would that I could avoid this political stuff.  But I cannot in good conscience retreat into my inner citadel and let my country be destroyed — the country that makes it possible for me to cultivate the garden of solitude, retreat into my inner citadel, and pursue pure theory for its own sake.

Political discourse is unavoidably polemical. The zoon politikon must needs be a zoon polemikon. 'Polemical’ is from the Greek polemos, war, strife. According to Heraclitus of Ephesus, strife is the father of all: polemos panton men pater esti . . . (Fr. 53) I don't know about the 'all,' but strife  is certainly at the root of politics.  Politics is polemical because it is a form of warfare: the point is to defeat the opponent and remove him from power, whether or not one can rationally persuade him of what one takes to be the truth. It is practical rather than theoretical in that the aim is to implement what one takes to be the truth rather than contemplate it.  What one takes to be the truth: that is the problem in a nutshell.  Conservatives and leftists disagree fundamentally and non-negotiably.  

Implementation of what one takes to be the truth, however, requires that one get one’s hands on the levers of power. Von Clausewitz held that war is politics pursued by other means. But what could be called the Converse Clausewitz principle holds equally: politics is war pursued by other means.

David Horowitz, commenting on "Politics is war conducted by other means," writes:

In political warfare you do not just fight to prevail in an argument, but rather to destroy the enemy's fighting ability.  Republicans often seem to regard political combats as they would a debate before the Oxford Political Union, as though winning depended on rational arguments and carefully articulated principles.  But the audience of politics is not made up of Oxford dons, and the rules are entirely different.

You have only thirty seconds to make your point.  Even if you had time to develop an argument, the audience you need to reach (the undecided and those in the middle who are not paying much attention) would not get it.  Your words would go over some of their heads and the rest would not even hear them (or quickly forget) amidst the bustle and pressure of everyday life.  Worse, while you are making your argument the other side has already painted you as a mean-spirited, borderline racist controlled by religious zealots, securely in the pockets of the rich.  Nobody who sees you in this way is going to listen to you in any case.  You are politically dead.

Politics is war.  Don't forget it. ("The Art of Political War" in Left Illusions: An 
Intellectual Odyssey Spence 2003, pp. 349-350)

The first sense I mention only to set aside. Timeless entities, if there are any, exist tenselessly and have their intrinsic properties  and some of their relational properties tenselessly.  The 'exists' in '7 exists' is tenseless, and so is the 'is' in '7 is prime.' And please note that the tenselessness is not a result of a de-tensing operation or an abstraction from tense: the tenseless terms are inherently tenseless because the entity in question is inherently timeless.  So far, no problem.  Talk of tenselessness with respect to timeless entities, if any,  is wholly intelligible.

Problems arise when we ask whether temporal objects, items in time, can be intelligibly described as tenselessly existing or tenselessly propertied.   Is it intelligible to say that Boethius tenselessly exists and is tenselessly a philosopher?  In one sense it is; but the  sense in which it is gives no aid and comfort to presentism.  That is what I will rehearse in this post. 

TENSELESSNESS AS DISJUNCTIVE OMNITEMPORALITY

We consider the disjunctively omnitemporal sense according to which 'x tenselessly exists' means 'x existed or x exists or x will exist' where each disjunct is tensed, and 'x is tenselessly F' means that 'x was F or x is F or x will be F' where each disjunct is tensed. This sense of 'tenseless' is not properly tenseless: tensed expressions must be used to formulate it. But while improper, it is has the virtue of being wholly intelligible. Thus Julius Caesar tenselessly exists in the disjunctively omnitemporal sense in that he either existed, or exists (present tense), or will exist. He tenselessly exists because the first of these tensed disjuncts is true. When we say that he tenselessly exists we are simply abstracting from when he existed. We are leaving the 'when' out of consideration. We are not thereby attributing to the man some non-disjunctive property of tenseless existence, whatever that might be.

And similarly with 'Julius Caesar is a Roman emperor.' We all understand the sentence to be true despite Caesar's having ceased to exist long ago. We take the sentence to be tenselessly true because we read the copula in the disjunctively omnitemporal sense.  The same goes for 'Hume is an empiricist,' a sentence one might find in a history of philosophy. Although Hume does not now exist, we can say, intelligibly, that he IS an empiricist because we are using 'is' in a disjunctive omnitemporal way.  

DOES DISJUNCTIVELY OMNITEMPORAL TENSELESSNESS HELP US UNDERSTAND THE PRESENTIST V. ETERNALIST DEBATE?

Unfortunately, it doesn't.  The presentist tells us that only present items exist, whereas the eternalist says that past, present, and future items all exist.  To engage each other they have to be using 'exist' in the same sense: their disagreement is predicated upon an agreement as to the sense of 'exists.' Now  it it is clear that this cannot be the present-tensed sense of 'exists.'   Nor can it be the timelessly tenseless sense of 'exists.'  And not the disjunctively omnitemporal sense either.  Why not?

Everyone agrees that Boethius no longer exists. But 'no longer exists' can be understood in two ways. The eternalist (B-eternalist) holds that what no longer exists exists all right, but in the past. The presentist, however, holds that what no longer exists does not exist.  For the eternalist, Boethius tenselessly exists.  For the presentist, Boethius does not tenselessly exist. Therefore, for the presentist, it is not the case that Boethius either did exist or does exist or will exist.  But this is plainly false, since Boethius did exist. Therefore, the sense of 'exists' that allows presentist and eternalist to engage each other cannot be the disjunctively omnitemporal sense of 'tenseless.'

So what the hell sense of 'tenseless' is it?  

More later. It's Saturday night. Time for a stiff one and Uncle Wild Bill's Saturday Night at the Oldies.

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