Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains
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If nothing else, philosophy is prophylaxis against infection by scientistic pseudo-understanding. Take the jab! Boosters to follow.
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In a remarkable television broadcast on December 15, 2022, Tucker Carlson made an explosive charge. He pointed out that, contrary to law, the White House was refusing to release thousands of pages of documents about the assassination of John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963. Carlson said that these documents proved CIA involvement in the assassination and that someone within the government who had looked at these documents made a direct statement to this effect.
Here is what Carlson said: “Not long after Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald on camera in the basement of Dallas police headquarters, a lot of Americans started to have some questions about the Kennedy assassination. It was, you’d have to admit, a pretty extraordinary sequence of events. A lone gunman murders the president of the United States. And then, less than 48 hours later, that lone gunman is himself murdered by another lone gunman.
What are the odds of that?
And here is the Tucker Carlson broadcast that RFK, Jr. called "the most courageous newscast in 60 years."
I forgot where I found this diagram. (HT to Dmitri Dain who after my initial posting e-mailed me the reference.) The diagram is pretty good except insofar as it suggests that the divine nature of Christ is a proper part of the divine nature.
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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.)
Dylan Thomas, A Child's Christmas in Wales
The following selections and commentary courtesy of Edward Buckner.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LndB94i2F_0
“Dieux Parmi Nous” (God among us) by the French composer Olivier Messiaen. The glorious final movement from Messiaen's nine-part La Nativité is performed by Richard Gowers on the organ of King's College Chapel, Cambridge. It is a tradition in England for the family to listen to the carols from King’s on Christmas Eve, and for the women to talk over it. [Ed's remark cannot be sexist if it is true.]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YamipW44v4c
“Toccata on 'Veni Emmanuel'” by the English composer Andrew Carter. The origin of the melody was a mystery for some time but it was recently found in a 15th-century manuscript in the National Library of France. Keep an eye out for the organist’s socks.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SixnHKwyrjI
“Jesus Christ the Apple Tree" by English composer Elizabeth Poston. During World War II Poston is supposed to have worked as a secret agent.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tq8mgyBUJgk
“Nativity Carol” by English composer John Rutter. Rutter is hated by many as verging on kitsch, but “Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas without this magnificent carol”. Judge for yourself. [A little kitsch never hurt anybody.]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXOaTOylx0c
“This Christmas Night” by Australian composer Malcolm Williamson. Williamson worked as a nightclub pianist when he moved to London, but soon converted to Roman Catholicism. He became the Master of the Queen's Music in 1975.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8XQwLp9d5eg
“A Babe is Born” by Welsh composer William Mathias. His anthem “Let the people praise Thee, O God” was written for the July 1981 royal wedding of the Prince and Princess of Wales, and thus heard by 1 billion people. The tenor part is difficult for us tenors.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1wHyMR_SCA
“O Come, All Ye Faithful” (Adeste Fideles) from our wonderful Westminster Abbey. The origin of the melody is unknown, but was first published by John Francis Wade in his collection Cantus Diversi. Watch out for the lovely descant at ‘Sing choirs of angels’.
Whether or not it is true, the following has a clear sense:
1. The Hatfields outnumber the McCoys.
(1) says that the number of Hatfields is strictly greater than the number of McCoys. It obviously does not say, of each Hatfield, that he outnumbers some McCoy. If Gomer is a Hatfield and Goober a McCoy, it is nonsense to say of Gomer that he outnumbers Goober. The Hatfields 'collectively' outnumber the McCoys.
It therefore seems that there must be something in addition to the individual Hatfields (Gomer, Jethro, Jed, et al.) and something in addition to the individual McCoys (Goober, Phineas, Prudence, et al.) that serve as logical subjects of number predicates. In
2. The Hatfields are 100 strong
it cannot be any individual Hatfield that is 100 strong. This suggests that there must be some one single entity, distinct but not wholly distinct from the individual Hatfields, and having them as members, that is the logical subject or bearer of the predicate '100 strong.'
So here is a challenge to Ed Buckner the nominalist. Provide truth-preserving analyses of (1) and (2) that make it unnecessary to posit a collective entity (whether set, mereological sum, or whatever) in addition to individual Hatfields and McCoys.
Nominalists and realists alike agree that one must not "multiply entities beyond necessity." Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem! The question, of course, hinges on what's necessary for explanatory purposes. So the challenge for Buckner the nominalist is to provide analyses of (1) and (2) that capture the sense and preserve the truth of the analysanda and yet obviate the felt need to posit entities in addition to concrete particulars.
Now if such analyses could be provided, it would not follow that there are no 'collective entities.' But a reason for positing them would have been removed.
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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.
An important 1984 essay by Sidney Hook.
Related: The Trial of Kyle: The Show Trial Comes to America
See also:
These days I have money to travel, time, and opportunities. In close communion with my 'inner Kantian,' however, I resist the blandishments and with them the vexations of spatial translation. By my present count, there are three chief reasons to keep to my Southwestern Koenigsberg, the Emersonian, the Pascalian, and my own. The first is that travel does not deliver what it promises; the second is that it delivers us unto temptation and vexation; the third is that it knocks us out of our natural orbit, to return to which wastes time.
Read the rest at Substack.
The Big Apple is now rotten to the core, thanks to 'progressives.' There is no wisdom on the Left, no common sense, no basic decency. Cal Thomas:
The exodus of New Yorkers for less expensive and safer climes has been well documented. In 2021, the U.S. Census Bureau reported that 300,000 residents left New York state. I suspect the number this year will match or exceed that. High taxes, crime, and the cost of housing and living are all contributing factors. Police are leaving, too: 831 so far this year. Who can blame them, given the way they are treated?
[. . .]
It gives a new meaning to the opening line of the Frank Sinatra song “Start spreading the news. I’m leaving today.” Except the leaving now is from, not to New York.
One thing you need to know about 'progressives' is that the spirit that animates the leaders of their movement, if not every rank-and-file useful idiot and somnambulant fellow-traveller, is the spirit of Mephistopheles. Goethe had his number:
I'll translate the first two lines. "I am the spirit that always negates! And rightly so. For the worth of all that comes to be is in its ceasing to be." This is the spirit of Mephisto and of Karl Marx, who quotes it approvingly somewhere. (Look it up! Why do I have to do all the work?)
'Progressive' nihilism is supposed to issue in utopia and the immanentization of the eschaton. But how do the destroyers know that it will? How do they know that burying the hard-won wisdom of the past and destroying what has taken centuries to build will clear the ground for the arisal of an earthly paradise? They don't know it. But we know that past attempts have failed disastrously. We know that from history, the same history that the 'progressives' with their latter-day equivalents of book burning will not learn from but will attempt to erase.
You need to ask yourself whether you support the depredations of cultural Marxism which include ethno-masochistic wokery, 'critical' race-delusionality, reality-denying social constructivism, the celebration of grotesquerie, the canonization of worthless individuals, the destruction of monuments to the great and noble, the destruction of the family, the moral corruption of children, the excusing of brazen mendacity at the highest levels of government . . . and I'm just warming to my theme.
One more thing.
There are really only two effective ways of 'voting.' One is with your feet, as when, for example, New Yorkers head for DeSantisLand. The other is with your wallet.
If your alma mater supports the DEI agenda, politely inform their financial officers that they will not receive one red cent from you as long as they do. This is something you can do that is not merely 'performative' as this word is now being used. (For the record, I do not approve of this linguistic innovation.) For, as Lee Iaococca said, "When money talks, ideology walks." Even the most irrational among us begin to think straight when money is on the table and their financial survival is on the line.
Here is a letter you are free to take as a model.
For more on cultural collapse, take a gander at this seven-minute video featuring the inimitable Camille Paglia.
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Transhumanist fantasies aside, we will all die. Faced with the inevitable, one naturally looks for consolation. Some console themselves with the thought that 'life goes on.' In the words of the great Laura Nyro song, And When I Die:
And when I die
And when I'm gone
There'll be one child born in this world
To carry on, carry on.
The singer consoles herself with the thought that life goes on. But is the thought that 'life goes on' a legitimate and reasonable source of consolation? Or is it an "escapist self-deception" as Robert Spaemann asserts? (Persons, Oxford UP, 2017, 115. Orig. publ. in German in 1996; first publ. in English in 2006)
I attempt in this entry to show that Spaemann is right.
Tony Flood comments:
Their occasional descent into verbal coarseness was as disappointing as it was unexpected. It seems that even for some people I most admire, the effort to resist that cultural pull downward is no longer worth the bother.
Our society-wide descent into verbal and other forms of coarseness and crudity outside of locker-room-type contexts can with justice be laid at the doorstep of the Boomer cohort (1946-1964). Tucker and Tulsi are Gen-Xers, and their generation followed ours in the downward direction. I myself, on Facebook and also here a few times, have employed harsh invective against our political enemies using such words as 'shithead,' 'crapweasel' (which I picked up from Michelle Malkin), and 'chucklephuck.' I may also have used 'asshole.' Much less offensive is 'p.c.-whipped,' which I got from Ed Feser. I don't need to explain the allusion.
There are two words, however, that I never use in any context. These are words I never even mention let alone use, except via oblique mention. The one is the c-word when used as a synecdoche. So used, it is not merely crude but vile. The other is the mf-word, which is unspeakably vile for reasons only the morally obtuse will not understand.
One attempt at justification goes like this. "You attack me verbally or physically and I will reply in kind to give you a taste of your own medicine in the hope that this will dissuade you from future bad behavior." For when bad behavior goes unpunished, more bad behavior inevitably follows. As one of my aphorisms has it:
Be kind, but be prepared to reply in kind.
The problem, however, is that our enemies won't be dissuaded in this way, except in a few instances. They feel themselves to be fully justified in their attacks on us. And so the downward spiral continues. Cruder and cruder. I call it 'crudification,' to give an ugly word to an ugly thing.
Tony Flood is a Christian and he knows that charity is demanded of Christians. But is it prudent in this time of civilizational collapse to be a Christian and walk the walk? It all depends on whether the underlying metaphysics is true.
And so once again we see that all roads lead to metaphysical Rome.
https://www.thefp.com/p/charles-fain-lehman-dont-tolerate-disorder-charlie-kirk-iryna-zarutska?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
Watched. Read. Wept.
Hey Bill, Got it now, thanks for clarifying. I hope you have a nice Sunday. May God bless you!
Vini, Good comments. Your command of the English language is impressive. In my penultimate paragraph I wrote, “Hence their hatred…
Just a little correction, since I wrote somewhat hastily. I meant to say enemies of the truth (not from the…
You touched on very, very important points, Bill. First, I agree that people nowadays simply want to believe whatever the…
if you do nothing else in what remains of this year, read that essay. please.
https://barsoom.substack.com/p/peace-has-been-murdered-and-dialogue?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=841240&post_id=173321322&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1dw7zg&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
From the Jacobin article: >>Kirk ran a well-funded political propaganda machine that promoted a simple message. “Liberals,” “radicals,” and “socialists”…
https://jacobin.com/2025/09/charlie-kirk-murder-political-violence >>Attempted and successful assassinations of political leaders are on the rise, as are politically motivated killings of less notable…
4 responses to “Christmas Eve at the Oldies”