Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

  • The Brentano Inference

    London Ed writes,

    Early on I commented on the following ‘Brentano’ inference, with the question of whether it is valid or not.

    (1) Jake is thinking of something, therefore Jake’s thinking contains something as object.

    I think you said it was valid.

    It is not a question easy to answer properly, and my impression is that Ed does not appreciate the depth of the issue or the complexity of its ramifications. You cannot just return a 'valid' or 'invalid' answer; the question has to be explicated.  The explication may be expected to turn up points of disagreement. We might, however,  be able to agree on some of the following. Perhaps only the first.

    a) If Jake is thinking of something, it does not follow that there exists (in reality) something such that Jake is thinking of it.  I am sure that we will agree on this most basic point. 

    b) If Jake is thinking of something, a distinction must be made between the occurrent episode of Jake's thinking (a datable event or process in Jake's mental life) and what the thinking purports to be of or about.  Typically, this will be something of a non-mental nature. And given (a), what the episode purports to be of or about may or may not exist without prejudice to the episode's being the very episode it is.  

    c) That the episode is occurrent as opposed to dispositional Ed will surely grant. Jake may be disposed to think of London when he is not thinking of it, but if he is thinking of the city, then his thinking is a mental act — 'act' connoting actuality, not activity — and thus a particular occurrence.

    d) Now if Jake is thinking about London, his act of  thinking purports to be about London which, of course, cannot be internal to anyone's mind or mental state.  London with all its buildings and monuments is and remains in the external world whether or not anyone thinks about it.  'Cannot be internal' means that London herself cannot be a constituent of anyone's thinking about London. It cannot be 'in Jake's head,' not even if that phrase is taken figuratively to mean: in Jake's mind. London cannot be a part of Jake's psychic state when he thinks about London.  And yet Jake and the rest of us can think about London and many of our thoughts are veridical.

    e) Although London is not a constituent of anyone's thinking about London, there must be some factor internal to the mental state, a factor  epistemically accessible to the subject of the state, that somehow represents or perhaps presents London to the subject of the state.  This factor is a feature of the mental state whether or not the external thing (the city of London in our example) exists. This internal factor does not depend on the existence of the external thing. If Jake in Arizona is thinking about London, and the city goes the the way of  Sodom and Gomorrah, i.e., ceases to exist, and if this event occurs while Jake is thinking about the English city, nothing changes in Jake's mental state: the thinking remains and so does its particular outer-directedness, its directedness to London and to nothing else.  In other words, if Jake is thinking about London and, unbeknownst to Jake, the city ceases to exist while he is thinking about it, Jake remains thinking and his thinking retains the same specific aboutness that it had  before the city ceased to exist.  Thus neither the thinking nor its aboutness, depend on the existence of London.   This aboutness or outer-directedness to a particular external thing — I am studiously avoiding for the moment the polyvalent term 'intentional object' — is or is closely related to the internal factor I mentioned above. What should we call it? If the act is the noesis, the internal factor responsible for the particular outer-directedness can be called the noema.

    f) Much more can be said, but enough has been said to answer Ed's question. He wants to know whether the inference encapsulated in the following sentence is valid or invalid:

    (1) Jake is thinking of something, therefore Jake’s thinking contains something as object. 

    The question cannot be answered as it stands. (1) needs disambiguation. 

    (1a) Jake is thinking of something in the external world; therefore, this thing, if it exists, is contained in Jake's thinking of it.

    INVALID.  

    (1b) Jake is thinking of something in the external world; therefore, there is something internal to Jake's thinking in virtue of which his act of thinking has the precise directedness that it has, and this item — the noema — is 'contained in' in the sense of dependent upon Jake's act of thinking.

    VALID.

    Further questions arise at this point. How are we to understand the 'relation' of this noema to the external thing that it presents or represents?  And what exactly is the status of the noema?  

     

    Bill Vallicella

    2 responses to “The Brentano Inference”

  • Kent Haruf

    I caught a glimpse of an intriguing title the other day, "Our Souls at Night." What a great title, I thought. So I picked up the novel whose title it is,  by an author I had never heard of, and began to read. I was not impressed at first, but put off by the spare writing, overly simple and flat-footed and awkward as if by intention.  If some writing is 'mannered,' this, the second  paragraph, struck me as 'anti-mannered':

    They lived a block apart on Cedar Street in the oldest part of town with elm trees and hackberry and a single maple grown up along the curb and green lawns running back from the sidewalk to the two-story houses. It had been warm in the day but it had turned off cool now in the evening. She went along the sidewalk under the the trees and turned in at Louis's house.

    Turned off cool? Next sentence: turned in?

    Perhaps my preciosity is showing. Or I am just quibbling. But I read on, and was sucked in. A good novelist has the power to draw the reader into his world and keep him there, page after page.   But I am only 30 pages in, so no more commentary from me. Let the author speak.  He tells his story in The Making of a Writer. A fine piece of writing. A couple of passages struck me. The first helps explain Haruf's simple style.

    During that period of my life out on the high plains, I was more or less a happy kid, I think, and I survived childhood with only a few hard lessons that I still remember. One was: don’t you be a show-off, and I have tried to abide by that injunction ever since, with all its contradictions and complications.

    And here he makes a point I have often made:

    If I had learned anything over those years of work and persistence, it was that you had to believe in yourself even when no one else did. And later I often said something like that to my graduate students. You have to believe in yourself despite the evidence. I felt as though I had a little flame of talent, not a big talent, but a little pilot-light-sized flame of talent, and I had to tend to it regularly, religiously, with care and discipline, like a kind of monk or acolyte, and not to ever let the little flame go out.

    I would put it like this: You have to believe in yourself beyond the evidence, evidence which, in the beginning, is insufficient to justify belief in one's powers. Take that, W. K. Clifford.

    HARUF_WEB-VERSION

     

    Bill Vallicella

  • Karl Barth, Divine Revelation, and Mystical Experience

    "It [divine revelation] is the opening of a door that can only be unlocked from the inside." Quoted by Thomas Merton in Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (Image Books, 1965, p. 10) from a Christmas sermon preached by Karl Barth in 1931. I am going to take this ball and run with it.

    Barth KarlImagine someone who would  pass through only those doors that he could open himself whether by hand, by key, by picking the lock, or by brute force.  Imagine him declaring, "The only  permissible passages are those initiated by me  and controlled by me at every step." Such a one would never knock or ring a bell. To knock or ring would be to rely on another for entry and thus to sacrifice one's ingressive self-reliance, to give it a name. It would be the heteronomy of help in violation of the autonomy of self-entry. "The only fully responsible entry is self-entry!"  "It is wrong always and everywhere to rely on another for entry."  "The only doors worth opening are those one can open by oneself!"

    The person I am imagining would be like the modern (post-Cartesian) man who accepts as true only that for which he has sufficient evidence, only that which he can verify for himself by internal criteria and methods. Such a one, if he were standing before the portals of saving truth that can only be unlocked from the inside, would deny himself access to such truth out of a  refusal to accept help. His fear of error would prevent his contact with truth.

    Would that be a prideful, and thus a morally censurable, refusal? Would it be the rebellious refusal of a miserable creature who, though dependent on God for everything, absurdly privileges his own petty ego and sets it up as epistemic arbiter?

    Or would the refusal to accept divine revelation be a laudable refusal that bespeaks a cautious and critical love of truth? "I so love the truth that I will accept no substitutes!"

    The question is not easy to answer. It is not even easy to formulate. The question concerns the very possibility of divine revelation, and the possibility of its acceptance, not the content of any particular putative revelation.

    Trust or verify?  The child is trusting, but gullible; he learns to be critical. Having come of age, and having been repeatedly fooled, he trusts as little as possible. The adult is wary, as he must be to negotiate a world of snares and delusions and evil doers.

    I had an unforgettable mystical experience at the age of 28. I was tormented by a torrent of deep doubts as to the ultimate sense of things.  Around and around I went like a Zen man in the grip of his koan. Striding along, alone, in the early pre-dawn of a Spring day in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, I came to a point where I caught a glimpse of the rising sun just as it appeared over the horizon. Suddenly all my doubts vanished and I was flooded with a deep intuition of the ultimate sense and rightness of things. The solar glimpse triggered a mystical Glimpse into the intrinsic intelligibility of the universe.  All my doubts vanished. The Last Word was sense, not absurdity! I bowed my head and was suffused with peace, and Metaphysical Trust, as I later described it in my journal.  Not a trust in this thing or that, or in any human person, or in oneself and one's powers of understanding, but trust in the Unseen Order in which this transient bubble of space-time is suspended and rendered meaningful.

    But of course that remarkable experience was only an experience, and no experience proves the veridicality, the reality, of its intentional object.  That's Modern Philosophy 101 and only an unthinking dogmatist could think it easily dismissed.

    The dialectic proceeds beyond this point, of course, but weblog entries are best kept succinct.  So I leave you with the alternative: Trust or Verify? Finite reason is not equipped to solve this conundrum. You will have to de-cide. That involves a leap of faith. You can put your faith in the Unseen or in your own powers.

    Little child Matthew Seek and Find Matthew

    Bill Vallicella

  • Jack Kerouac, King of the Beats

    Still 'jacking off' in December? Well, when I find something relevant I snag it for my files. The bit about Jack's saintly & sickly older brother Gerard in this chapter of a book by Barry Miles caught my eye re: my response to Vito C. , so here it is, below the fold.

    (more…)

    Bill Vallicella

  • Katastematic and Kinetic Pleasures

    David Kaston, emphasis added:

    . . . happiness (eudaimonia), according to Epicurus, is not simply a neutral or privative condition but rather a form of pleasure in its own right — what Epicurus called catastematic or (following Cicero’s Latin translation) “static” as opposed to “kinetic” pleasure. Although the precise nature of this distinction is debated, kinetic pleasures seem to be of the non-necessary kind (see below), such as those resulting from agreeable odors or sounds, rather than deriving from replenishment, as in the case of hunger or thirst. The philosophical school known as the Cyrenaics advocated increasing desires and seeking ever new ways of gratifying them.

    Epicurus objected that such pleasures are necessarily accompanied by distress, for they depend upon a lack that is painful (Plato had demonstrated the problematic nature of this kind of pleasure; see Gorgias 496C–497A, Philebus 31E–32D, 46A–50C). In addition, augmenting desires tends to intensify rather than reduce the mental agitation (a distressful state of mind) that Epicurean philosophy sought to eliminate. Catastematic pleasure, on the contrary, is (or is taken in) a state rather than a process: it is the pleasure that accompanies well-being as such. The Cyrenaics and others, such as Cicero, maintained, in turn, that this condition is not pleasurable but rather neutral — neither pleasurable nor painful.

    Bill Vallicella

  • Hunger and Satiety

    You should be hungry before every meal and sated after none.

    Bill Vallicella

  • I Kill a Bug

    And when I do, I apologize to him: "Sorry, man, nothing personal; but just one of my thoughts is worth more than your entire life."

    But if the insect is no distraction and can be easily dispatched to the outdoors, that is where he goes, or is sent. Sentience as such, no matter how low its level, is marvellous and mysterious and deserving of respect. 

    But not just sentience elicits my awe. I took my rest on a rock atop Miner's Saddle in the Western Superstitions. It had been a hard climb. Endorphins released, contemplative repose supervened. A fly landed on my arm. The lambent light of the desert Southwest illuminated its intricacy. What a piece of engineering! What a beautiful specimen of designedness!    

    The above is a nice introduction to The Concept of Design.

    ……………………………

    Vito Caiati writes,

    “But if the insect is no distraction and can be easily dispatched to the outdoors, that is where he goes, or is sent. Sentience as such, no matter how low its level, is marvelous and mysterious and deserving of respect.”

    Good for you, Bill! I faced a similar situation recently, one which involved a more evolved form of sentient life, a little mouse that had come in from my garden as the weather turned colder. He had been trapped at the bottom of my kitchen garbage bin, under the removal container, by my two cats. Removing them from the room, I lifted up the container and discovered him there, looking up at me. He, like your insect, was “dispatched” to the garden, rather than killed. These are small acts of mercy, but to arrive at them requires a good deal of humility and wisdom. I recall Henry Beston’s observation regarding animals, in The Outermost House, with which you may partially agree: “In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with the extension of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings: they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.”

    It is always a pleasure to hear from you, Vito. And as I think of you now, a pun occurs to me, In Vito veritas!

    I begin with a linguistic bagatelle. I see that when you quoted me you replaced my 'marvellous' with the more usual 'marvelous.' Why do I write 'marvellous' and 'tranquillity'? Being a linguistic conservative, I try to keep etymology in mind as far as I can given my limited erudition; the Latin is tranquillitas, and so to honor that origin I write the English counterpart with the double 'l.' Similarly with 'marvellous,' which is from Middle English merveillous, borrowed from Anglo-French, from merveille MARVEL entry 1 + -ous (Merriam-Webster).  You may call me an idiosyncratic pedant, but I am not, at least in these cases, aping the British spelling, although I am in conformity with it.

    I enjoyed the mouse story. A mouse, of course, is 'more human' in the sense of more anthropo-morphic than a fly or spider, and I would not have killed the little guy especially after his having been terrorized by your cats. And then I thought of the 'mouse passage' near the beginning of Jack Kerouac's Visions of Gerard which I re-read back in October. 

    One day he [Gerard] found a mouse caught in Scoop's mousetrap outside the fish market on West Sixth Street — faces more bleak than envenomed spiders, those who invented mousetraps [. . .] The hungjawed dull faces of grown adults had no words to praise or please little trying-angels like Gerard working to save the mouse from the trap [. . .] the little mouse, thrashing in the concrete, was released by Gerard [. . .] Took it home and nursed it, actually bandaged it, held it, stroked it, prepared a little basket for it, as Ma watched amazed . . . . 

    The beautiful quotation from Henry Beston resonates with me, especially when he writes that animals "move finished and complete."  I had a similar thought recently: "Cats are perfect as they are, or rather, a healthy non-defective cat is perfect as it is: it does not seek, or need to seek, wholeness or integration." That is part of a longer meditation which I am tempted to write up and post.  I suspect you will like it.

    Bill Vallicella

  • Duty and Inclination

    It is one's duty to control one's inclinations despite the strong inclination to dismiss one's duty.

    Bill Vallicella

  • Tough and Forebearing

    It is better to be tough on oneself and forebearing toward others than the other way around.

    Bill Vallicella

  • What does Populism Threaten?

    First posted on my Facebook page on this date three years ago.
     
    ………………………………
     
    POPULISM is a threat to a leftist internationalism that rejects national borders and denies to nations the right to preserve their cultures, the right to stop illegal immigration, and the right to select those immigrants who are most likely to prove to be a net asset to the host country, and most likely to assimilate. There needn't be anything white supremacist or white nationalist about populism. (By the way, white supremacism and white nationalism are plainly different: a white nationalist needn't be a white supremacist.) And of course there needn't be anything racist or xenophobic or bigoted about either nationalism or populism. It is a mistake to confuse nationalism with white nationalism, a mistake deliberately promoted by leftists.
     
    Populism in the style of Trump is not a threat to liberal democracy as the Founders envisioned it, but a threat to the leftist internationalism I have just limned and which contemporary 'liberals' confuse with the classically liberal democracy of the Founders. It is also quite telling that these 'liberals' constantly use the word 'democracy' as if it is something wonderful indeed, but they almost never mention that the USA is a democratic republic. Our republic has a stiff backbone of core principles and meta-principles that are not up for democratic grabs, or at least are not up for easy grabs: the Constitution can be amended but it is not easy, nor should it be.
     
    Those who think that democracy is a wonderful thing ought to realize that Sharia can be installed democratically. This is underway in Belgium. Brussels could be Muslim within 20 years. Let enough Muslims infiltrate and then they will decide who 'the people' are and who are not 'the people.' The native Belgians will then have been displaced. Ain't democracy wonderful?
     
    Let enough illegal aliens flood in, give them the vote, and they may or more likely will decide to do away with the distinction between legal and illegal immigration as well as the one between immigration and emigration. Ever wonder why lefties like the word 'migrant?' It manages to elide both distinctions in one fell swoop.
     
    A sane and defensible populism rests on an appreciation of an insight I have aphoristically expressed as follows:
    No comity without commonality.
    There cannot be social harmony without a raft of shared assumptions and values, not to mention a shared language. There is need of cultural coherence. A felicitous phrase, that. Our open, tolerant, Enlightenment culture cannot cohere and survive if Sharia-supporting Muslims are allowed to immigrate. For their ultimate goal is not to assimilate to our ways, but to impose their ways on us, eventually replacing us.
     
    Can you show I'm wrong?
    Bill Vallicella

  • Trotsky’s Faith in Man

    Substack latest.

    On 20 August 1940, the long arm of Joseph Stalin finally reached Trotsky in exile in Mexico City when an agent of Stalin drove an ice axe into Trotsky's skull. He died the next day.  The Left eats its own.

    Trotsky

    Bill Vallicella

  • It’s a House, not a Home

    Don't talk like a realtor unless you are one.  And even then . . .

    Bill Vallicella

  • Saturday Night at the Oldies: Dylan on Rick Nelson and James Burton

    Bob Dylan, Chronicles, Volume One (Simon and Shuster, 2004), p. 13:
     
    He was different from  the rest of the teen idols, had a great guitarist who played like a cross    between a honky-tonk  hero and a barn-dance fiddler. Nelson had never been a bold innovator like the early singers who sang like they were navigating burning ships. He didn't sing desperately, do a lot of damage, and you'd never mistake him for a shaman. 

    Nosiree, Bob, no shaman was he. There is more interesting material on Nelson in the vicinity of this excerpt. Dylan discusses Ricky Nelson in connection with his 1961 hit, Travelin' Man. But the great guitar work of James Burton to which Dylan alludes was much more in evidence in Hello Mary Lou. The Dylan Chronicles look like they will hold the interest of this old 60's Dylan fanatic.

    Here is a better taste of James Burton and his Fender Telecaster with Elvis Presley.  And here he is with the Big O dueling with Springsteen.  Here he jams with Nelson's sons.  Orbison on Nelson.

    It has been over thirty years now since Nelson died in a plane crash while touring. The plane, purchased from Jerry Lee Lewis, went down on New Year's Eve 1985. That travelin' man died with his boots on — as I suspect he would have wanted to. In an interview in 1977 he said that he could not see himself growing old.

    Be careful what you wish for.

    Bill Vallicella

  • The Sartorial Functionalist Speaks

    Substack latest.

    Bill Vallicella

  • The Game of Life

    The game of life is 'sudden death' with the time control unknown.

    Bill Vallicella

Latest Comments

  1. Bill and Steven, I profited from what each of you has to say about Matt 5: 38-42, but I think…

  3. Hi Bill Addis’ Nietzsche’s Ontology is readily available on Amazon, Ebay and Abebooks for about US$50-60 https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?an=addis&ch_sort=t&cm_sp=sort-_-SRP-_-Results&ds=30&dym=on&rollup=on&sortby=17&tn=Nietzsche%27s%20Ontology

  4. It’s unbelievable that people who work with the law are among the ranks of the most sophists, demagogues, and irrational…

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

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

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

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

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

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