Maverick Philosopher – Page 154 – Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Ontologically Serious and Unserious Uses of ‘Something’ and the Problem of Reference to the Nonexistent

If Jane is friendly, then there is something Jane is, namely, friendly. But one hesitates to infer either

1) There is (exists) such an object as friendly

which is not even well-formed, or

1*) There is (exists) such an object as friendliness

which is well-formed but offensive to the nominalist sensibility. 'Jane is friendly' commits one to Jane but not obviously to the property of being friendly.

According to Sainsbury and Tye (Seven Puzzles of Thought and How to Solve Them, Oxford UP, 2012, p. 114), "'There is something' is not an object quantifier" in sentences like 'There is something that Jane is, namely, friendly.' In such cases,

The 'thing' in 'something' is not ontologically serious. By contrast, expressions like 'object' and 'entity are used in philosophical discourse to mark ontological commitment; and words like 'dagger' and 'fountain of youth' are used by everyone in that way in extensional contexts. (ibid.)

The idea is that there are two senses/uses of 'something.' One is ontologically serious because ontologically committal while the other is not. If I kick a ball, then there is something I kick. (Ontologically committal use of 'something' in an extensional context.) If Macbeth hallucinated a dagger, then there is something Macbeth hallucinated, namely, a dagger. (Ontologically noncommittal use of 'something' in an intensional/intentional context.)

Do we have here the makings of a solution to the ancient problem of apparent reference to the nonexistent? I don't think so.

Go back to Jane. Jane is friendly. So there is something she is, namely, friendly. So far, so good. Everything is clear. But trouble starts and murk intrudes when we are told that the 'something' in play here is ontologically noncommittal: there is nothing in reality that Jane is, or is related to in virtue of which she is friendly. Thus there is no property, friendliness, that she instantiates, or any property that she has as a constituent, or anything like that. In reality there is just Jane. But then what is the difference between Jane's being friendly and her being unfriendly?

It is evident to me that there has to be something in reality that grounds that difference. If you deny this, I will not understand you. Suppose you say that Jane's being friendly is just the circumstance that someone attached or applied the predicate 'is friendly' to her. I will say: So she needs to be called friendly to BE friendly? That is absurd. If I called her unfriendly, would she then be unfriendly? What if I called her anorexic? IS she whatever I SAY she is? Has she no properties independently of my say-so? If no one called her anything, would she have no properties at all? Before the evolution of languages was the Earth neither spheroid nor non-spheroid? Is there no difference between a predicate's being true of an individual and its being applied to or predicated of an individual?

These considerations convince me that the distinction between ontologically serious and unserious uses of 'something' has not been established. Note that it needs to be established independently of the Macbeth problem. To first introduce it as a solution to the Macbeth problem would be ad hoc.

There is also this question: what is the difference between saying that there is something — in the ontologically unserious sense — that Macbeth hallucinated and saying that Macbeth hallucinated a Meinongian nonexistent object? How does the Sainsbury and Tye solution differ from a Meinongian one?

BEATific October Again

It's October again, my favorite month, and Kerouac month in my personal literary liturgy. And no better way to kick off Kerouac month than with 'sweet gone Jack' reading from "October in Railroad Earth" from Lonesome Traveler, 1960. Steve Allen provides the wonderful piano accompaniment. I have the Grove Press Black Cat 1970 paperback edition. I bought it on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, 12 April 1973. I was travelling East by thumb to check out East Coast graduate schools where I had been accepted, but mostly I 'rode the dog' (Greyhound bus), a mode of transport I wouldn't put up with today: two guys behind me chain-smoked and talked all the way from Los Angeles to Phoenix. New Orleans proved to be memorable, including the flophouse on Carondelet I stayed in for $2. It was there that Lonesome Traveler joined On the Road in my rucksack.

I never before had seen Tabasco bottles so big as on the tables of the Bourbon Street bars and eateries. Exulting in the beat quiddity of the scene, I couldn't help but share my enthusiasm for Nawlins with a lady of the evening, not sampling her wares, but just talking to her on the street, she thinking me naive, and I was.

Here is a long excerpt (7:10), which contains the whole of the first two sections of "October in Railroad Earth," pp. 37-40, of the Black Cat edition.

You don't know jack about Jack if you don't know that he was deeply conservative despite his excesses. The aficionados will enjoy The Conservative Kerouac.

And a tip of the hat to old college buddy and Kerouac and jazz aficionado 'Monterey Tom' Coleman who will enjoy Jack and Frank.

Polarization and Flotation in Politics

Can we avoid both polarization and a noncommittal floating above the fray that does not commit to one side or the other? I fear not. Politics is war. You must take a side. You can't play the philosopher on the battlefield. A warrior at war cannot be "a spectator of all time and existence," as noble as such spectatorship is. A warrior who is fully human, however, will know when to put aside his weapons and take up his pen. He will know that, in the end, "The pen is mightier than the sword." But only in the end. Now you are in the field. If you don't survive the fight, there will be no time left for 'penmanship.'

How Strange!

How strange it would be if death were to leave us all in the dark as to the ultimate why and wherefore! How strange if no one knows, no one ever knew, and no one will ever know what it's all about. And not because the Answer is hidden, but because there is none.

If you say that it could be like that, I won't disagree. There is presumably and prima vista no presumption in favor of point, purpose, intelligibility and sense. But if you find nothing strange about this putative state of affairs, then I will view you and your spiritual vacancy with a mixture of pity and contempt.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Messages, Letters, Epistles, Novels and such

Bob Dylan, Take a Message to Mary. I prefer it to the Everly Bros. effort.

Boxtops, The Letter

R. B. Greaves, Take a Letter, Maria

Beatles, Paperback Writer

Dinah Washington, I Could Write a Book

Donovan, Epistle to Dippy

10,000 Maniacs, Hey Jack Kerouac

Simon and Garfunkel, I am a Rock. "I have my books and my poetry to protect me." 1960's teenage alienation at its finest.

Ketty Lester, Love Letters

Paul McCartney, I'm Gonna Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter. Original by Fats Waller.

How could I fail to include . . .

Monotones, The Book of Love. I never did find out who wrote it.

“My Conscience is Clear”

You deceive yourself : you cleared it when you should have borne its burden and bite, the just tax for your wrongdoing.

The Monk and the Worldling

Monk: The world you love cannot last and betrays its vanity thereby. Its impermanence argues its unreality. It is unworthy of your love, noble soul!

Worldling: The God you love is worthy of your love should he exist, but he does not, or at least you have no proof that he does; no proof sufficient to render reasonable your rejection of this passing world and its finite satisfactions for a possibility merely believed in.

An Advantage of Childlessness

Our parents and relatives cared about us enough to judge us, sometimes justly, sometimes unjustly. They understood us and they didn't. Their intentions were mainly good, but their misunderstanding was a burden. They were wrapped up in their own lives and troubles; ours were relatively unreal to them. "What do you have to worry about?" a parent may say to a child drifting in the horse latitudes of teenage alienation, aimlessness, and cognitive dissonance. With their passing our burden of their misunderstanding was lifted. And they too were lifted — beyond the reach of our critical judgments.

Childlessness has this advantage: there is no one left to judge us. We are free. I am not an anti-natalist. I am merely pointing out an advantage to having reached a temporal 'space' in which some of us are safe from being boxed-in by the judgments of well-meaning but uncomprehending kith and kin.

Kadın erkeğin şeytanıdır

"Woman is man's devil." (Turkish proverb)

Never underestimate the power of concupiscence to derange, disorient, and delude.

When Spanish bishop Xavier Novell resigned last month, the Roman Catholic Church cited strictly personal reasons without going into detail.

It has now emerged in Spanish media that he fell in love with a woman who writes Satanic-tinged erotic fiction.

In 2010 at the age of 41, he became Spain's youngest bishop, in Solsona in the north-eastern region of Catalonia.

[. . .]

It came as a shock when Religión Digital reported that he had fallen for divorcee Silvia Caballol, a psychologist and erotic novelist. The news site said that the former bishop was now looking for a job in the Barcelona area as an agronomist.

Caballol's books include titles such as The Hell of Gabriel's Lust and the trilogy Amnesia. In the blurb for one of her works, the reader is promised a journey into sadism, madness and lust and a struggle between good and evil, God and Satan with a plot to shake one's values and religious beliefs.

Story here.

Enemies Have Their Uses

You may do your level best to hide your faults and defects, but others will expose them. Even if they do so maliciously they perform a service to those who are open to correction. An enemy is sometimes to be preferred to a friend in tacit collusion with one's moral complacency.

Civilization Requires Deterrence

Wisdom from Victor Davis Hanson. There is precious little of it on the Left. We are awash in the deleterious consequences. Excerpt below the fold.

Continue reading “Civilization Requires Deterrence”

Berdyaev on the Moral Source of Atheism

There are respectable forms of atheism. The atheist needn't be a rebellious punk stuck in intellectual adolescence, swamped by sensuality, and given to self-idolatry.

Nicholas Berdyaev, The Destiny of Man (Harper Torchbooks, 1960, tr. Natalie Duddington, p. 24):

It is precisely the traditional theology that leads good men, inspired by moral motives, to atheism. The ordinary theological conception of freedom in no way saves the Creator from the responsibility for pain and evil. Freedom itself is created by God and penetrable by Him down to its very depths. In His omniscience, ascribed to Him by positive theology, God foresaw from all eternity the fatal consequences of freedom with which He endowed man. He foresaw the evil and suffering of the world which has been called into being by His will and is wholly in His power; He foresaw everything, down to the perdition and everlasting torments of many. And yet He consented to create man and the world under those terrible conditions. This is the profound moral source of atheism.

I read Berdyaev's The Beginning and the End in the summer of 1970. The following autumn I committed myself to philosophy as my vocation. The Russian personalist moved me deeply at the time, but then other philosophical interests and concerns took over. It is wonderful to be reading him again some 50 years later. If this existentialist is a bit on the febrile side, he at least avoids the empty intellectual gamesmanship of the analytic logic choppers whose philosophical activity bespeaks their spiritual vacuity. The task of the true philosopher is to combine rigor and Wissenschaftlichkeit with spiritual depth. Plato and Spinoza come to mind. We lesser lights are not quite up to the task, but we ought to take such luminaries as guides and tutelary spirits.

Addendum 9/24

Some of us are old enough to remember seeing Bishop Fulton J. Sheen on television. His message below is effectively answered by Berdyaev above. The cause of theism is not well-served by the caricaturing of atheists as all of the same stripe. There are saints and scamps on both sides of the theological divide.

Singular Concepts and Singular Negative Existentials

A re-post from 15 May 2012. Reproduced verbatim.

………………………………….

London Ed seems to be suggesting that we need irreducibly singular concepts (properties, propositional functions) if we are properly to analyze grammatically singular negative existence statements such as

1. Vulcan does not exist.

But why do we need to take 'Vulcan' to express a singular concept or haecceity property? Why isn't the following an adequate analysis:

1A. The concept Small, intra-Mercurial planet whose existence explains the peculiarities of Mercury's orbit is not instantiated.

Note that the concept picked out by the italicized phrase is general, not singular. It is general even though only one individual instantiates it if any does. The fact that different individuals instantiate it at different possible worlds suffices to make the concept general, not irreducibly singular.