Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

  • Free Speech, Censorship, Toleration, and a Lame Libertarian Argument

    Substack latest


  • Brandon on Nemes on Orthodoxy and Heresy

    Just over the transom from Steven Nemes:

    My book, Orthodoxy and Heresy, was recently published in the Cambridge Elements series by Cambridge University Press.
     
    Brandon of the Siris blog recently wrote a post responding to it with an objection. I have also replied to his objection in the comments. You might be interested.
    I remember Brandon from the early days of the blogosphere which we both entered in 2004.  The first weblogs began to appear circa 2000, and by 2003-4 the 'sphere was in high gear. By 2010 or so it was considered by many to be pas​sé what with the migration of cyber-bullshitters to Twitter, Facebook, etc. leaving the 'sphere to serious content producers. Siris is a seriously good blog.
     
    Blogging, like Rock and Roll, is here to stay. 

  • Tulsi Gabbard on the Second Amendment

    Tulsi Gabbard is quite the political phenomenon: personable, very intelligent, courageous, and sensible in her views. Here she explains how her views on 2A have changed and indeed improved. 

    Around 9:25 Gabbard quotes from the recently-imploded ACLU: "Racism is foundational to the Second Amendment."  That's just insane for so many reasons. I'll leave it to you to work out why. Or else just listen to Tulsi's commentary.


  • Fetterman Unfettered: Against Ableism

    In the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, John Fetterman is currently competing with Dr. Mehmet Oz for a seat in the U. S. Senate. Any objective person who observes both men in action can see that Fetterman is mentally, morally, and politically unfit for office.  (I won't comment on the 'hoodie,' the ugly forearm tattoos, the neck bulge, the man's lack of a career outside of politics, or his 'anti-gravitas': the man's overall thuggish appearance.)

    Mentally, he has trouble formulating clear sentences.  A recent stroke has left him impaired. Morally, he is a brazen liar: he recently stated in a debate with Dr. Oz that he supports fracking when it is obvious from his previous assertions and his overall position that he does not. Politically, he supports destructive hard-Left positions with respect to drugs and crime and everything else.

    But let's say you believe in 'equity' as wokesters use the word. You believe in equality of outcome and proportional representation regardless of merit and qualifications.  If 'equity' is your concern why shouldn't a stroke-impaired man be a U. S. senator? After all, if dementia is no bar to high office, why should stroke-impairment be?  Fetterman's fit with the Biden bunch couldn't be tighter. To demand qualifications for high office or for any job at all is to discriminate against the unqualified, and we now know that discrimination is among the worst of sins. We are all equal and the supposed accomplishments and talents of Dr. Oz the heart surgeon really ought to count for nothing in an equitable society. We have made progress in the 'progressive' sense of the term. And we are better people for it. 

    The disabled are just as qualified as the rest of us. For they are not really disabled at all; they are differently abled.  I myself was born with only one functioning ear. But this birth defect gives me the ability to block out sound in bed by putting my good ear down on the pillow. Clearly, this wonderful ability of mine compensates for all of the drawbacks of monaural hearing such as the inability to tell from which direction a sound is coming. The point generalizes: all disabilities are really abilities in disguise. No one should ever be evaluated in any way on the basis of supposed 'talents' or 'qualifications' or 'abilities' or 'accomplishments.' What I said in my first paragraph convicts me of the thought crime of 'ableism.'  I ought to check myself into the nearest 'progressive' re-education camp.


  • Losertarian Update

    A tip of the hat to Dmitri Dain for sending us here where we read:

    Libertarian Marc Victor dropped out of Arizona’s closely watched Senate race on Tuesday, encouraging voters to cast their ballots for Republican Blake Masters in his challenge to Sen. Mark Kelly (D).

    Polls had shown Victor garnering support in the low single digits, but his small bloc of supporters could provide a critical boost to Masters, as surveys show the Republican only trailing Kelly by a few percentage points.

    “Don’t vote for Marc Victor for Senate, vote for Blake Masters,” Victor said on Tuesday. “Blake’s in a very tight race here with Mark Kelly, and I want to see him win.”

    Victor met virtually with Masters prior to dropping out of the race and posted a video of their roughly 20-minute conversation.

    Hats off to Marc Victor for his good sense. To vote for him would have been utter folly since it is (a) certain that he would not have been elected and (b) certain that he would have siphoned off votes needed by the impressive Blake Masters to defeat the disgusting Mark Kelly.

    Once more: politics is a practical game. Without the power to implement your policies, they are nothing but hot air and paper. Don't throw away your vote on unelectables. Don't confuse a political party with a discussion society. 

    Marc  Victor is a local gun guy. Here is one of his videos. Here is another. He talks sense! 


  • Regular programming to resume when Typepad gets its act together

    Meanwhile, Happy Halloween from Screamin Jay Hawkins.

    Substack latest is about zombies and the value of being conscious.


  • Saturday Night at the Oldies: Cool Tunes and More Mose

    Ramsey Lewis Trio, The In Crowd

    Dave Brubeck, Take Five

    Corsairs, Smoky Places

    Harry Nilsson, Everybody's Talkin'

    B. B. King, Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out 

    Sam Cooke, Fool's Paradise

    Thelonius Monk, In Walked Bud

    Mose Allison, Your Mind's on Vacation

    Mose Allison, I Don't Worry About a Thing

    Mose Allison, Don't Get Around Much Anymore

    Too cool for you? Try this.

    Mose Allison, The Song is Ended


  • Third Parties as Discussion Societies in Political Drag

    Substack latest.

     

     


  • The Losertarian Party

    The Libertarian Party is for losers. If you are a conservative who votes Libertarian, you are a damned fool. You say you stand on 'principles'? Principles are great. And some of the Libertarian ones are salutary. But principles without power are just paper.  Politics is a practical game. Wise up and get with the program. Don't throw away your vote on unelectables.

    You have heard me say many times that politics is a practical game. I don't mean that it is unserious. Some games are serious; chess is one, life is another. Life is as serious as cancer, and the wrong people in power can put a serious dent in your living of your life. 


  • Tulsi Gabbard Endorses Kari Lake for Arizona Governorship

    Here


  • Three Axes of Conflict

    Antony Beevor in The Spanish Civil War (Orbis 1982, Penguin 2001, p. 279) writes that in the aftermath of the war both sides engaged in gross simplifications for propaganda purposes:

    As a result, the three axes of conflict (left-right, centralist-regionalist, and authoritarian-libertarian) have often been crudely amalgamated, leaving the ferocity of the war partly unexplained.

    Philosophers do well to study history to offset their penchant for the bird's-eye view.  They need to come to ground from time to time if only to fuel themselves for further flight. Feasting on the carrion of fact, however, is not particularly nutritious. So what caught this philosopher's eye was the three-axes schema. Philosophers love schemata.  They love the synoptic and panoptic survey. 'Spectators of all time and existence . . . ."

    The three-axes schema strikes me as relevant to the current political war in the USA as we teeter on the brink of World War Three thanks to the stupidity and criminality of the Democrat Party and the useful idiots who support it.

    1) Left-Right. It might be useful to distinguish between the Old Left, the New Left, and the 'Woke' Left. (Having sneered, I now drop the sneer quotes, at least for the space of this paragraph.) What distinguishes the Woke Left is corporate capitalism, the globalist capitalism of mega-corporations with the economic, and in consequence thereof political, clout to bend both government and the Fourth Estate to their collective will, thereby destroying the independence of both of the latter and eliminating checks on their unbalanced power.

    2) Centralism-Regionalism. Liberty versus tyranny defines the battle for the soul of America.  Tyranny emanates from the central government which, while endlessly mouthing 'democracy' and 'rule of law' respects neither. Liberty, if it can survive, will be defended locally and regionally by citizens with the civil courage to speak out and face 'cancellation' and worse. (I am thinking, among other things, of ordinary citizens who attend school board meetings and protest being labelled 'domestic terrorists' for rejecting the indoctrination of their children in Critical Race Theory, in 1619-type historical revisionism, in transgender ideology, and in anti-Caucasian ethno-masochism.) Regionalism is or is closely related to federalism. (The overturning of Roe v. Wade scored a point for the latter; the Left's febrile outrage clearly demonstrates its anti-federalism and anti-democratic spirit. )

    3) Authoritarian-Libertarian. American conservatism is not authoritarian but classically liberal. But while classically liberal, and thus opposed to throne-and-altar paleo-conservatism, it also opposes the anti-religionism and anti-traditionalism of the Left, especially that of the 'woke' Left, which is a particularly virulent and lethal strain of leftism. It thus treads the via media avoiding both the Road to Serfdom (you get the allusion, of course) and the road to anarchy as lately instantiated by Atifa black shirts and BLM Marxist thugs.


  • Einstein, Relativity, and Relativism

    Substack latest.


  • To be Alone is Bliss

    Your invitation's kind
    So I hope you won't mind
    If your party I miss.
    To be alone is bliss.

    Your friends are such a bore
    And idle talk's a chore
    They will be good to miss.
    To be alone is bliss. 


  • Tulsi Gabbard Defends Objective Truth . . .

    . . . at a rally to end child mutilation. Gabbard's  three-minute address begins at 19:30 and runs until 22:42. "Without recognition that there is such a thing as truth, there are no boundaries in our society, which why we are where we are."

    That something so obvious needs to be stated explicitly shows how far we have fallen.  But precisely because we have fallen so far, Tulsi Gabbard is to be applauded for having courageously stated it. That it should take courage to state something so obvious is yet another index of our social decline.

    And now, if you can spare ten minutes, listen to Chloe Cole's story at 47:15-57:50. 


  • Animal Awareness: Aristotle, Galileo, Kant

    This just over the trans0m from Edward Buckner. I have added my comments in blue.

    Aristotle: Even if all animals were eliminated and thereby all perceptions (since only animals perceive), “there will still be something perceptible—a body, for example, or something warm, or sweet, or bitter, or anything else perceptible.”

    BV: Evaluation of the above requires that we get clear about the sense of 'perceptible.' There are at least the following three senses:

    1) X is perceptible1 =df it is logically possible that x be perceived.

    2) X is perceptible2 =df it is nomologically possible that x be perceived.

    3) X is perceptible3 =df x is able to be perceived by some sentient being.

    I suggest that (3) is what we normally mean by 'perceptible.'  What (3) says is that for a thing to be perceptible, there must be at least one existing perceiver with the ability to perceive the thing.  On (3), then, Aristotle is mistaken. So on a charitable interpretation, he probably means something like (2): many if not most natural things are such that, if there were an able-facultied perceiver on the scene, one or more natural things would be perceived, and would be perceived as having in themselves such qualities as being warm, bitter, or sweet. Aristotle is a realist about what we now call secondary qualities.

    Galileo: “tastes, odors, colors, and so on are no more than mere names so far as the object in which we place them is concerned, and that they reside only in the consciousness. Hence if the living creature were removed, all these qualities would be wiped away and annihilated.”

    BV: Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) belongs to the modern period which he helped inaugurate, along with Rene Descartes (1596-1650).   The main point to note for present purposes is that Galileo reduces the sensory qualities that Aristotle viewed as properties of things themselves to perceiver-relative 'secondary qualities.' So if "living creatures were removed," then at least the secondary qualities would be "removed" along with them. That's quite the contrast with Aristotle.  The Stagirite is a realist about warmth, etc,; the Italian is an idealist about warmth, etc.

    What would Kant’s view be? Does he think that if all perceiving beings ceased to exist, then appearances would cease to exist? But appearances, according to him, are things like trees and rocks. Does he then think that if all perceiving beings ceased to exist, trees and rocks, and all other non-sentient things, would cease to exist? We should be told.

    BV:  Underlying Ed's questions is the question: Who or what is the knowing subject for Kant?  For Aristotle, the knowing subject is the concrete man embedded in nature, a hylomorphic composite in which anima forma corporis. For Kant, however, the concrete man, the man of flesh and blood embedded in nature, with both animal body and animal soul, is blosse Erscheinung, a mere appearance or phenomenon, and thus an object of knowledge, but not the subject of knowledge, i.e., not the knowing subject.  For Kant, the knowing subject is transcendental.  This is Kant's view whatever you think of it. It is undoubtedly fraught with difficulties, but my sketch is accurate albeit superficial. 

    And so the answer to both of Ed's questions is in the negative.


    7 responses to “Animal Awareness: Aristotle, Galileo, Kant”


Latest Comments


  1. https://www.thefp.com/p/charles-fain-lehman-dont-tolerate-disorder-charlie-kirk-iryna-zarutska?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

  2. Hey Bill, Got it now, thanks for clarifying. I hope you have a nice Sunday. May God bless you!

  3. Vini, Good comments. Your command of the English language is impressive. In my penultimate paragraph I wrote, “Hence their hatred…

  4. Just a little correction, since I wrote somewhat hastily. I meant to say enemies of the truth (not from the…

  5. You touched on very, very important points, Bill. First, I agree that people nowadays simply want to believe whatever the…

  6. 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



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