Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

  • The Susanne K. Langer Circle

    Tony Flood writes, 

    I'm proud of this, Bill.

    And you're the only one I know who would appreciate it.
     
     
    The work they did to "internalize" all the links on my clunky old site is impressive. Langer scholars (I'm told) love my prefatory notes, so they asked if they could host my Langer "portal." I told them my old site's lifespan is a function of mine and therefore they should grab whatever they wish promiscuously.  
     
    I've moved beyond Langer, of course, but enjoyed curating those items. Now they will be available to scholars on a more permanent basis (at least for the rest of this dispensation. 
    One of the things that attracted me to Tony's original site, many years ago, was that he was no narrow specialist, but had wide interests including interests in those I call 'obscure, neglected, and underrated  philosophers.' See here for a post that lists some of them, and here for a sparsely populated category.  One of the obscure is John N. Deck. I had stumbled upon this character on my own, via a journal article of his I found in 1989 in the old New Scholasticism, but Tony supplied me with backstory and further references. I trust Tony would agree with me that "Specialization is for insects." (Robert Heinlein) Or at least the early Tony would. 
    Bill Vallicella

    2 responses to “The Susanne K. Langer Circle”

  • The Calvin Blocker Story

    Calvin BlockerMy wife and I owned a house in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, on Euclid Heights Boulevard, from 1986-1991. That location put me within walking distance of the old Arabica coffee house on Coventry Road. The Coventry district was quite a Bohemian scene in those days and there I met numerous interesting characters of the sort one expects to find in coffee houses: the  flâneur and flâneuse, wannabe poets and novelists, pseudo-intellectual bullshitters of every stripe, and a wide range of chess players from patzers to masters.

    It was there that I became acquainted with International Master Calvin Blocker. Observing a game of mine one day, he kibitzed, "You'd be lucky to be mated."

    One day he came to my house to give me a lesson. He pulled out a piece of paper and wrote down from memory the famous game in which the great Paul Morphy crushed Count Isouard and the Duke of Braunschweig in 17 moves. "Study this," Calvin said.

    Here is his story.

    Harvey Pekar talks about Coventry.

    For the true chess aficionado, here is 45 minutes of Grandmaster Ben Finegold on Calvin Blocker.

    Bill Vallicella

  • Politics by Assassination, Anyone?

    Von Clausewitz held that war is politics pursued by other means. What I call 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)

    A semantic stretch is involved in Horowitz's "Politics is war." On a very strict definition of 'war,' war is only between states.  To put it pedantically, the only admissible values of the variables x, y in 'x is at war with y' are states. If so, there cannot be a war on drugs, on terror, on Christmas, a war between political factions or parties, between sub-state entities, or between a sub-state entity such as Hamas and a state such as Israel.

    Critical thinking requires close attention to extended (stretched) uses of terms. Nevertheless, some semantic extensions are justified: politics is sufficiently like war to be called war.  In war sensu stricto assassination is often justified. 

    This brings me to Luigi Mangione and his (alleged)  assassination of Brian Thompson, the CEO of United Health Care.  Mangione has been charged with the premeditated murder of Thompson whom he shot in the back, not for personal reasons, but for political ones. So, with a bit of a stretch, we may call Mangione's (alleged) killing of Thompson a case of political assassination, despite the fact that Thompson was not a politician.

    Now to the point: if you have no problem with Mangione's deed, then, by parity of reasoning, you should have no problem  with some right-winger assassinating U. S. District Judge James Boasberg.  Recall:

    Mr. Trump signed a proclamation under the Alien Enemies Act last month, claiming that Tren de Aragua is "perpetrating, attempting, and threatening an invasion or predatory incursion" against the U.S. and declaring that all members of the gang in the U.S. unlawfully were subject to immediate detention and removal. [. . .] 

    The day after Mr. Trump's proclamation, five Venezuelan nationals who were being held at a detention center in Texas filed a lawsuit that alleged Mr. Trump's invocation of the Alien Enemies Act violated the terms of the law and asked a federal district court in Washington, D.C., to block their removals.

    U.S. District Judge James Boasberg swiftly agreed to stop their deportations for 14 days and later expanded his temporary order to prohibit the administration from removing all noncitizens in U.S. custody who are subject to Mr. Trump's proclamation.

    So: Do you have a problem with assassinating U. S. District Judges who unconstitutionally presume to put themselves about the duly-elected Commander-in-Chief who quite reasonably ordered the deportation of vicious Tren de Aragua illegal aliens?  I do! 

    This is why I consider the death penalty to be what justice demands in the Mangione case, should he be convicted.  If he is found guilty, he should be made an example of and executed within a 'reasonable' period of time (two years?), time enough for a 'reasonable' number of appeals (two? three?).  I'm all for due process and the presumption of innocence.

    We are doomed if we do not take a strong stand against  assassination.

    Unfortunately, a majority of leftists, according to this article, think political assassination is a societal good. Excerpt:

    Before the 21st century, Democrats were mostly working- and middle-class Americans who believed in the rule of law and loved America. The murderous ones—the violent Black Panthers and Weathermen—existed on the fringe. Now, though, the fringe has moved to the heart of the Democrat party, which is a death cult. And like all death cults, it’s requiring greater sacrifices. The latest manifestation is that a majority of self-identified leftists believe that assassinating people for political ends (e.g., Donald Trump and Elon Musk) is fully justified.

    One of the things that radical Muslims and leftists have in common is that they are death cults. The Islamic penchant for rape, torture, and murder on gleefully sadistic scales (e.g., the Yazidis, Israelis, and Christians in Africa) speaks for itself. However, we in the West have been indoctrinated not to recognize the Democrat death cult for what it is.

    To the leftist fools who call for political assassinations, whether in plain English, or under cover of such formulations as "Take down Elon Musk," I say:  Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind! (Hosea 8:7)

    Related:  Paul Gottfried, On Democratic Party Violence

    Bill Vallicella

    5 responses to “Politics by Assassination, Anyone?”

  • The Left’s Ideological Capture of the American Academy of Pediatrics

    Here:

    At the same time, the organization [the AAP] began uncritically embracing political positions popular on the left, calling for “the strongest possible regulations of handguns for civilian use,” for example, and going all-in on diversity, equity, and inclusion policies. The AAP’s “sample language for office forms,” for example, lists nine possible gender identities, eight possible sexual orientations, and asks, “What sex were you assigned at birth?” The guidance insists that pediatricians announce their pronouns to patients and ask about children’s gender identity during every visit, while also “degenderizing” their own language by using phrases such as “as a person who has a uterus” rather than “as a woman.” The AAP also supports policies that allow biological males to play on female sports teams, and its recommendations have been cited in lawsuits brought by trans activists against states that have banned boys in girls’ sports.

    This garbage is beneath refutation.  The best way to combat it is by executive order, which is what President Trump did in Protecting Children From Chemical and Surgical Mutilation.

    Bill Vallicella

  • Successful Explanation Again

    Returning once again to the article by Tomas Bogardus, with a 'hat tip' to him for writing it and to Malcolm Pollack for bring it to my attention, let us reconsider his  premise (2), about which I raised some questions in earlier posts:

    2. Any explanation can be successful only if it crucially involves no element that calls out for explanation but lacks one.

    I suggested earlier that an explanation might count as successful even if it does contain one or more unexplained elements. Suppose a man is found dead. Why did he die? What was the salient cause of his death? (I  assume a distinction between a salient cause and circumambient causal factors.)* Did the man die from stroke, heart attack, gunshot, smoke inhalation while asleep?  Suppose the latter.  Why was there smoke in his bedroom? Because his house caught on fire. Why did it catch on fire? Because the house was hit by lightning. 

    My question: Couldn't a successful explanation of the man's death stop right here? If we were to stop here would we not have achieved sufficient understanding of the man's death for practical purposes (purposes of ordinary life and the law). We would know why the man died and we would be able to rule out foul play. We would know that he did not die from ill health, suicide, or from such foolish behavior as smoking in bed. Bear in mind that the topic here is explanation, not causation, even in this case in which the explanation is a causal explanation.  

    If I understand (2), it implies a negative answer to my question.  (2) seem to be telling us that one cannot provide a successful causal explanation of  any particular empirical fact unless (i) it is possible in principle to explain every temporally antecedent salient event and causal factor in the series of events  and factors culminating in the fact to be explained (the man's death in the example) subject to the proviso  that (ii) the explanation cannot 'bottom out' in brute  or unexplainable facts.

    This amounts to saying that to explain successfully  any contingent thing or event it must be possible in principle — logically possible — to explain every contingent thing or event in the causal ancestry of the thing or event to be explained.  I say 'possible in principle' because no finite person has the ability to explain every thing or event in the causal ancestry of the thing or event to be explained.

    In endnote 18 of his paper, Bogardus entertains something like my  objection  to his (2) and makes a reply:

    Or suppose a meal appears before you, from nothing, with no explanation. You eat it, satisfying your hunger. Surely, you can now successfully explain your satiety by reference to the meal you ate, even if that meal itself has no explanation, yet calls out for one. [. . .]

    Response: I deny that I would have a successful explanation of . . . the satiety.

    The problem with this response is that I could not know that the meal appeared ex nihilo, and thus without a cause. If I were seated at table and a meal were suddenly to pop into existence before me, I would lose my appetite from fear! (No appetite, no sating thereof.) I would very reasonably believe that I was either hallucinating or losing my mind or that a preternatural event had occurred from a preternatural cause, and that either angelic or demonic  or divine or some other kind of paranormal agency was involved.  I would have no good reason to think that the meal sprang into existence out of nothing without cause.  The counterexample works only if I know or reasonably believe that the meal sprang into existence ex nihilo without cause.  But I do not know or reasonably believe that.  So how does the magic meal show that a successful explanation must regress back to an unexplained explainer? How does it show that there cannot be brute facts?  I do not see that TB's  response to my dead man  counterexample to (2) 'cuts the mustard' — to remain with the prandial theme.

    ______________

    *For example, the salient cause of a forest fire is not the presence of oxygen in the atmosphere, which is merely a causal factor without which the fire could not have occurred.    A salient proximate cause might be lightning, the actions of an arsonist. or the carelessness of a camper who did not properly douse his campfire.)

    Bill Vallicella

    5 responses to “Successful Explanation Again”

  • Nile Gardiner on Trump, Eurosceptic

    Key Takeaways

    Trump is treating the European Union as a competitor and even an adversary, as a force that is actively undermining the U.S. economy and the American people.

    Trump shares with Europe’s rising national conservative parties the view that far too much power is in the hands of Brussels.

    Americans increasingly hold that the European Union does not advance their interests, and stands against the principles of liberty and sovereignty.

    Here.

    Bill Vallicella

    9 responses to “Nile Gardiner on Trump, Eurosceptic”

  • Peter Singer Reviews Thomas Nagel’s, Circling the Good

    Here. (HT: the ever-helpful Dave Lull)

    Bill Vallicella

  • Saturday Night at the Oldies: The Gambler He Broke Even

    Kenny Rogers died in 2020 at the age of 81.  

    A few days after he died, on my way back from a traipse in the local hills, I encountered a couple the female half of which suffers from Parkinson's. Being the over-clever fellow that I am, I asked her what condition her condition was in, thereby alluding to a curious '60s number. Her husband caught the allusion and hipped me to a fact hitherto unknown to me, namely, that the band in question, The First Edition, was headed by Kenny Rogers before he went country.  He was quite the genre-hopper. Before the acid-rock tune. he sang with the New Christy Minstrels, a 'sanitized' and 'wholesome' collegiate folk outfit. Here is "Green Green" with upbeat Barry Maguire in the lead. This was before Maguire got all topical and protesty and dark with Eve of Destruction in the summer of '65.

    I never listened to much Kenny Rogers, but of course I know and like his signature number, now a permanent bit of Americana that taps into the myths that move the red-blooded among us. I mean The Gambler:

    And when he finished speakin'
    He turned back toward the window
    Crushed out his cigarette
    And faded off to sleep
     
    And somewhere in the darkness
    The gambler he broke even
    But in his final words
    I found an ace that I could keep
     
    You've got to know when to hold 'em
    Know when to fold 'em
    Know when to walk away
    And know when to run
     
    You never count your money
    When you're sittin' at the table
    There'll be time enough for countin'
    When the dealin's done.
     
    Bonus cuts:
     
    Clancy Bros., Ramblin' Gamblin' Willie
     
    Byrds, Eight Miles High.  Referenced in the 'condition' tune.
    Bill Vallicella

    8 responses to “Saturday Night at the Oldies: The Gambler He Broke Even”

  • No Exit

    Vita mutatur non tollitur.

    Bill Vallicella

  • MACGA: Make the Continent Great Again!

    Europe has lost its collective mind. The UK is especially troubling:

    The University of Oxford, one of the most revered and historic institutions of higher learning in the world, has requested that Oxford city council officials add the names of five soldiers who fought against Great Britain in the First World War to a memorial honoring Britain’s war dead. You cannot make this up.

    The five individuals – Oxford alumni all – include three individuals born on German territory, one born on Hungarian soil, and another born in Poland. They all fought against the Allied armies in World War I, but will nonetheless be "honored" alongside Britain’s war dead. Talk about losing the plot.

    My maternal grandfather, of Hungarian birth, fought in the Austro-Hungarian army as a forward artillery observer in the First World War. He survived the war, but had he not, I would never expect his name to be added to a monument honoring the casualties of Britain in the Great War.

    This bizarre news comes on the heels of real "progressive" depredations on European "values" – those old-fashioned things like freedom of speech, democratically elected officials and so on. In a case of political persecution via the judiciary, remarkably similar to what Donald Trump suffered at the hands of numerous U.S. courts, a French court sentenced the most popular French politician and likely future French President, Marine Le Pen, to four years in prison for alleged improper use of European Union funds. The case revolved around the conservative populist Le Pen and other members of her National Rally party using funds from the EU to allegedly improperly reimburse aides for political work. Le Pen and her colleagues denied all along that they did anything improper. Le Pen was sentenced to four years, with two years likely to be suspended and the other two years requiring an ankle bracelet and no incarceration.

    Bill Vallicella

  • Nancy Pelosi in 1996: A Pre-Trumper on Tariffs

    You have probably seen this by now, but in case you haven't, here is Nancy Pelosi in 1996 talking sense! I didn't think she had it in her, given the inanities she has been spouting for the last quarter century. I don't see much if any difference between what she said then about  tariffs, trade imbalances, and trade reciprocity and what Trump is saying now.

    Part of what enrages contemporary Dems about Trump is that he has (a) stolen their thunder, and (b) is actually doing things they only talked about doing, e. g,  curtailing waste, fraud, and abuse at the federal level, controlling the borders, and shrinking the size of the federal government.

    Blinded by their mindless rage, they cannot assess policy proposals on their own merits, but only on whether or not they are supported by Trump. If Trump is for it, they are against it, no matter what it is, and vice versa.

    Anti-Trump Dems cannot stand the man because he has transformed the fat-cat GOP into a people's party.  The Never-Trump Republicans cannot stand him because he gate-crashed their rich guy club and exposed the bow-tied Beltway/Bulwark boys and girls for the effete and epicene bunch they are.  Interestingly, Trump has won the sympathy, though not the full support, of the socialist outlet, The Militant. See here for a recent article in support of my assertion.

    But he wins because he is loaded too, and more importantly, loves his country, its people, and has the biggest cojones of the toughest hombre on the world stage at present.  

    Bill Vallicella

    10 responses to “Nancy Pelosi in 1996: A Pre-Trumper on Tariffs”

  • Who Put the ‘Man’ in ‘Manufacture’?

    A congresswoman asked the question recently. It is a  question from a fem-Dem that exposes her ignorance.

    There is no 'man' in 'manufacture' in the way there is a 'bomp' in the "bomp bah bomp bah bomp" and a 'ram' in the "rama lama  ding dong."  

    'Manufacture' is built out of two Latin words, manus, manus (fourth declension, feminine) meaning hand, and the verb facere, meaning to make.  Etymologically, to manufacture something it to make it by hand, which is something women can do and often do better than men.

    It is also interesting to note that manus, manus (the singular and the plural are the same except that the 'u' is  short in the singular, long in the plural) is one of the few Latin nouns that is both feminine and ends in -us. Herewith, another reason why there is no 'man' in 'manufacture.'

    I could easily go on, and you hope I won't.

    But it does raise a question: why are Dems so ignorant? The person in question is a "white, educated female" like so many Never- and Anti-Trumpers. Educated?  Here is another word currently badly misused. Graduating with a degree from a leftist seminary doesn't make one educated in  any serious sense of the term.  We live in a time of inflation and not just of the monetary variety.

    Why do Dems and 'liberals' generally have such low standards?  It is almost as if they have never met a standard they did not want  to erase, erode, eviscerate, eradicate.  

    I have a lot to say on this topic, but it is time to get to work on more serious writing.  There is more to life than sanitizing the spaces befouled by leftists.  'Sanitize' in the sense of cleaning and making sane. 

    MASA! Make America sane again! 

    Bill Vallicella

    10 responses to “Who Put the ‘Man’ in ‘Manufacture’?”

  • The Message of Visible Tattoos

    Top o' the Stack.

    Me? I sport no tattoos and never will. My dress is functional and tailored to the needs of the occasion. No one could accuse me of being a Sharp-Dressed Man

    Tattoo-face

    Bill Vallicella

    One response to “The Message of Visible Tattoos”

  • Vanity

    This empty world obtrudes upon our senses so persistently and with such regularity of effect that thoughts about how real it could be hardly gain purchase. A material world has no trouble getting the attention of  a material man. It punches us hard in our eyes and ears. One must retreat from the multiplicity-positing diaspora of the senses by taking thought in order properly to doubt its ultimacy. But how gossamer is thought as compared to the rude impacts of sensory reality!

    And so we impute to this passing scene more reality and importance than it has. Its reality is in part our projection. Teetering on the brink of eternity we take time and its fleeting blandishments to be the end all and the be all.

    Here is an old man, a flight of stairs away from a major coronary event, lusting after more loot and land. Hanging by a thread, he is yet convinced that he is securely suspended.

    Bill Vallicella

  • Rod Dreher on J. D. Vance of “Live Not by Lies”

    Here

    Perhaps the most despicable feature of our political enemies is their penchant for mendacity in all of its many modes. There are so many examples. Here is one: Pelosi's Orwellian Mendacity: A STFU Moment

    Bill Vallicella

    2 responses to “Rod Dreher on J. D. Vance of “Live Not by Lies””

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