Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

  • The Seven Deadly Sins of Pasta

    Originally posted in April 2005 at my first blog, and then reposted in October 2009 on this site.  Time for a repost! Pasta matters! All 'races' thereof: capellini, vermicelli, spaghetti, linguine, fettucine, bucatini, rigatoni, mostaccioli . . . .

    ……………………………

    The following are the Seven Deadly Sins pertaining to the cooking and eating of pasta. Infractions may incur a visit from my New Jersey cousin Vinnie and his pals Smith and Wesson.

    1. Using too small of a pot. A capacious pot is essential for the proper cooking of pasta. For most purposes I use an 8 quart pot. When I make my famous lasagne, however, out comes the monster 16 quart job.

    2. Insufficient water. Be sure the pot is filled three-quarters full. With a big pot, there is little chance of a boil-over. But in case of the latter, a little olive oil added to the water will quell any uprising.

    3. Adding the pasta before the water is boiling. Wifey once broke this rule. I instructed her to add the pasta when the water boiled. She claims she did, and that led to a discussion of the meaning of ‘boiling.’ I hereby lay it down that water is not boiling unless it is ROILING and JUMPING. To put it a bit more scientifically, pure water at sea-level is not boiling until it is at 212 degrees Fahrenheit. Since our tap water is pretty good, I use it, not wanting to burden my reverse osmosis purification system.

    4. Breaking the pasta before putting it in the pot. This criminal act is particularly repellent to the true connoisseur, and a sure sign of a pasta greenhorn. It defeats the whole purpose of the eating of (long) pasta, a tactile experience that requires the twirling of the strands around the fork, and, therefore, unbroken strands. Deadly sin #4 usually follows upon sin # 1, as drinking upon gambling.

    5. Overcooking the pasta. Pasta must never be overcooked. It is to be prepared al dente. That’s Italian for to the tooth, meaning that the pasta should put up a bit of resistance to the tooth that bites into it. It should be cooked just beyond crunchy. The pleasure of pasta consumption is largely tactile: the stuff by its lonesome does not have much taste.

    6. Failing to properly drain the pasta before the addition of sauce. The result of this is a disgusting dilution of the sauce. Proper drainage requires the proper tool, the colander. Invest in a good one made of stainless steel. Plastic is for wimps. And if you try to drain pasta using the pot top, then you mark yourself as a bonehead of the first magnitude and may scald yourself in the process.

    7. Chopping pasta on the plate. When I see people do this, I am tempted to make like al-Zarqawi and engage in an Islamo-fascist act. Let’s say you are eating capellini, ‘angel hair.’ (This is the quickest cooking of the long pastas.) There it is on the large white plate, richly sauced, anointed with a bit of extra virgin olive oil — why buy any other kind? — besprinkled with fresh hand-grated Pecorino Romano or Parmigiana Reggiano, (not something out of a cardboard cylinder), artistically set off with a small amount of finely chopped parsley, and awaiting your attention. It is a thing of beauty. So what does a bonehead do? He starts chopping it up.

    Learn how to do it right. Take some strands in the fork tines, twirl, and you should end up with a ball of pasta at the end of your fork. Practice makes perfect. Now enjoy the tactile delight along with a glass of Dago red.

    Bill Vallicella

  • Is Existence Completeness?

    Marco Santambrogio, "Meinongian Theories of Generality," Nous, December 1990, p. 662:

    . . . I take existence to mean just this: an entity, i, exists iff there is a determinate answer to every question concerning it or in other words, for every F(x) either F[x/i] or ~F[x/i] holds.  The Tertium Non Datur is the hallmark of existence or reality.  This is entirely in the Meinong-Twardowski tradition.

    In other words, existence is complete determinateness or completeness: Necessarily, for any x, x exists if and only if x is complete, i.e., satisfies the property version of the Law of Excluded Middle (tertium non datur).  Now I have long maintained that whatever exists is complete, but I have never been tempted by the thesis that whatever is complete exists.  By my lights, there has to be more to existence than completeness. If I am right, existence cannot be reduced to, or identified with, completeness.

    Reader Grigory Aleksin just now reports that the late Dale Jacquette to whom I pay tribute here has a similar view:

    Definition of Existence:" For any object O, O exists, has being or is an entity, if and only if O has a maximally consistent property combination."
     
    Definition of a Maximally Consistent Property Combination:" A property combination PC for any logically possible object O is maximally consistent if and only if, for any logically possible extraontological property F, either F is in PC or non-F (the complement of F) is in PC, but not both"
     
    Thus he holds that:
     
    " A combinatorial ontology holds that existence is nothing more or [nor] less than completeness and consistency, or what is also called maximal consistency. The definition, properly understood and applied, provides a unified analysis of the concept of being for all entities, including existent objects, actual states of affairs and the actual world. "
     
    "An extraontological property, as the name implies, is a property that by itself does not entail anything about an object’s ontic status, and that is not instantiated unless the relevant property combination is maximally consistent. To maintain that existence does not characterize any object says, in short form, that the object’s property combination is maximally consistent with no predicational gaps only if, for any extraontological property or property complement, the combination includes either the extraontological property or its complement, but not both."
     
    The existence-is-completeness doctrine has a interesting consequence which, to my mind, amounts to a reductio ad absurdum:
    Why something not nothing Jacquette daleWhat Jacquette is telling us is that any maximally consistent combination of properties or states of affairs exists just in virtue of being maximally consistent.  I see two problems with this. 
     
    The first problem is that his view entails that every possible world is actual, in which case no possible world is absolutely actual.   Accordingly, every possible world is at best actual-at-itself and not actual, full stop. We end up with a view very much like David Lewis's. Why do I say this? Well, if we consider all the possible combinations of states of affairs, there will not just be one that is maximally consistent and complete and thus existent, but many. 
     
    The second problem for Jacquette is that every maximally consistent combination of states of affairs  is necessarily actual.  So not only is every possible world actual at itself, but every such world is necessarily actual at itself.
     
    Are these two problems really problems? (Are they bugs or features?)  They are problems for me because I have contrary intuitions. By my lights, there can be only one actual world, and that world is both absolutely actual and contingently actual.  Furthermore, there is no necessity that any world be actual. There might have been no world at all as Jacquette understands 'world': Possibly, no maximally consistent combination of states of affairs exists.  It might have been like this: there is God, who exists of metaphysical necessity, and an infinity of maximally consistent combinations of states of affairs, but none of these combos exists in reality outside the divine mind. 
     
    This is equivalent to saying that, while existence entails completeness, completeness does not entail existence. Something must be superadded to a maximally consistent and complete combination of extraontological properties to make it exist.  That something is existence.  The superaddition to a complete essence of existence is what is known in theological terms as creation, at least on one view of divine creation.
     
    I say that there is more to existence than completeness; Jacquette denies what I affirm.  Is there any way to decide this rationally?  
    Bill Vallicella

    8 responses to “Is Existence Completeness?”

  • ‘Political’ is not a Dirty Word

    Years ago I heard a man on C-Span whose name and the name of whose organization I have forgotten. The man headed an outfit promoting a strict interpretation of the U.S. constitution. Throughout his talk he repeated the remark that his organization was not political, not political, NOT POLITICAL!
     
    Nonsense, say I. What the hell else could it be? What could be more political than questions about constitutions and their interpretation, and organizations that promote a particular style of constitutional interpretation?
     
    'Political' is not a dirty word. How could it be when the human being, by nature, is zoon politikon, a political animal? Aristotle, who made the point, also appreciated that the political life cannot be the highest life. That honor goes to the theoretical life. The vita activa subserves the vita contemplativa. The doctor angelicus follows in the footsteps of the Peripatetic. 
    Bill Vallicella

  • Can the American Flag be Politicized?

    From my Facebook page, toned-down and slightly expanded.
    …………………………..
     
    Some know-nothing at the New York Times claimed that conservatives have politicized the American flag. That's quite a trick! How can you politicize what is already and inherently political? Can you 'meteorologize' the weather? The American flag is a POLITICAL symbol. What it stands for is a political entity. It stands for the American POLITY. "The Republic for which it [the flag] stands" — to borrow a formulation from the Pledge of Allegiance — is constitutionally-based, and that constitution includes POLITICAL statements among which are ones that state what the government may and may not do. For example, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion . . ." (from the First Amendment).
     
    The American flag cannot be politicized. It is a political symbol and what it symbolizes is not politically neutral. If you don't like the political arrangement that the flag stands for, a constitutionally-based republic, then you should say that and own up to being anti-American. But Democrats and other leftists are not known for their honesty, Orwellian abusers of language that they are.
    Bill Vallicella

  • Nietzsche, Truth, and Power

    Nietzsche's conflation of truth with power is one source of Critical Race Theory.

    Substack latest.

     

    Bill Vallicella

  • Nothing too Small for so Small a Creature

    I am petty; nothing petty is foreign to me. Or to my journal.

    Richard Weaver, "Life Without Prejudice" in Life Without Prejudice and Other Essays, Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1965, p. 11:

    Upon one occasion when Boswell confessed to Johnson that he feared some things he was entering in his journal were too small, the latter advised him that nothing is too small for so small a creature as man.

     

    Bill Vallicella

  • Dreher contra Buchanan on “All men are created equal.”

    Rod Dreher quotes Patrick J. Buchanan:

    “All men are created equal” is an ideological statement. Where is the scientific or historic proof for it? Are we building our utopia on a sandpile of ideology and hope?

    Dreher responds:

    With that, Buchanan repudiates not only the founding principle of our Constitutional order, but also a core teaching of the Christian faith, which holds that all men are created in the image of God. 

    I am with Dreher on this without sharing quite the level of high dudgeon that he expresses in his piece. 

    I am always surprised when people do not grasp the plain sense of the "that all Men are created equal" clause embedded in the opening sentence of the second paragraph of the American Declaration of Independence. It cannot be charitably interpreted as a statement of empirical fact. If it were so interpreted, it would be false. For we all know, and certainly the Founders knew, that human beings are NOT equal as a matter of empirical fact either as individuals or as groups.

    Suppose a statement can be interpreted in two ways. One way it comes out plainly false; the other way it comes out either true or plausible or not obviously untrue. Then what I understand the Principle of Charity to require is that we go the second way. 

    For Buchanan to demand "scientific or historic proof" shows deep misunderstanding. For again, the claim is not empirical. Is it then a normative claim as Mona Charen (quoted by Dreher) seems to suggest? It implies normative propositions, but it is not itself a normative proposition. It is a metaphysical statement. It is like the statement that God exists or that the physical universe is a divine creation. Both of the latter statements are non-empirical. No natural science can either prove them or disprove them. But neither of them are normative.  They are factual statements, though not empirically factual.  (Observe also that a factual statement need not be true. 'BV has three cats' is a factual statement, indeed it is empirically factual. It is not a normative statement, and it is a statement that can be empirically confirmed or disconfirmed. But it is false.)

    Note that the Declaration's claim is not that all men are equal but that all men are created equal. In such a carefully crafted document, the word 'created' must be doing some work. What might that be?

    There cannot be creatures (created items) without a Creator. That's a conceptual truth, what Kant calls an analytic proposition. So if man is created equal, then he is created by a Creator. The Creator the founders had in mind was the Christian God, and these gentlemen had, of course, read the Book of Genesis wherein we read that God made man in his image and likeness. That implies that man is not a mere animal in nature, but a spiritual being, a god-like being, possessing free will and an eternal destiny. Essential to the Judeo-Christian worldview is the notion that man is toto caelo different from the rest of the animals. He is an animal all right, but a very special one. This idea is preserved even in Heidegger who speaks of an Abgrund zwischen Mensch und Tier. The difference between man and animal is abysmal or, if you prefer, abyssal. Man alone is Da-Sein, the 'There' of Being; man alone is endowed with Seinsverstaendnis, an understanding (of) Being.  But I digress onto a Black Forest path.  

    Now if all men, whether male or female, black or white, are created equal by God, and this equality is a metaphysical determination (Bestimmung in the sense of both a distinctive determination and a vocation) then we have here the metaphysical basis for the normative claim that all men ought to be treated equally, that all men ought to enjoy equally the same  unalienable rights, among them, Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.  (We note en passant that these are negative rights!)

    All men are normatively equal because they are metaphysically equal. They are the latter because they are spiritual beings deriving from one and the same spiritual source.  Each one of us is a person just as God is a person. We are equal as persons even though we are highly unequal as animals.

    Without this theological basis it is difficult to see how there could be any serious talk of equality of persons. As the alt-righties and the neo-reactionaries like to say, we are not (empirically) equal either as individuals or as groups. They are absolutely right about that.   

    Dreher is also right that the theologically-grounded equality of persons is "the founding principle of our Constitutional order," and thus of our political order.  Repudiate it, as Buchanan seems to be doing, and you undermine our political order.

    What then does our political order rest on if the equality of persons is denied? 

    Related: Sullivan is Right: Universalism Hasn't Been Debunked

    Bill Vallicella

  • Bob Dylan at 80: A Sober Assessment

    Graham Cunningham:

    It pains me a little to say it, given my own past devotion, but some cold perspective is needed here. Bob Dylan was—from 1962 to the early 1980s—an extraordinary singer-songwriter and, in terms of quantity of great material, simply without equal. For the last 40 years, though, he has mostly been trading on the reputation he built in those years. There are exceptions to this judgment, yes, but not many: the 1983 Infidels album, a few tracks on the 1997 Time Out of Mind, and “Things Have Changed” from the soundtrack of the 2000 film Wonder Boys, for example.

    Did Dylan deserve the Nobel Prize for Literature that he won in 2016? I’m not sure; he’s probably not sure, either. He was consistently good for about 20 years, an amazingly long time for a rock star. And he can take credit for spawning a whole musical genre. Many other songwriters in the same musical territory, such as Paul Simon or Bruce Springsteen, have, at their best, been as good or almost as good—but not nearly so often, or for so long.

    The truth is, Bob Dylan, now 80, will never get “back on form.” Aging rock stars don’t do that; no one does. One of the most quoted lyrics of “Murder Most Foul” informs us that “It’s 36 hours past Judgment Day.” Dylan has been unquestionably the most influential songwriter of his era; no one can take that away from him. But as a long-time fan, I can’t help but wish that he had hung up his songwriting boots decades ago. His musical stature could then have remained closer to that of artists who die young, unsullied by the inevitable failures that must come to all careers—even one as extraordinary as his.

    Bill Vallicella

  • No Polity without Comity

    Substack latest.

    No polity without comity, and no comity without commonality.

    E pluribus unum is a noble goal. But a durable and vibrant One cannot be made out of just any Many.  Not just any diversity is combinable into unity.

    This is why the oft-repeated 'Diversity is our strength' is foolish verbiage that could be spouted only by a liberal-left shallow pate. 

    Bill Vallicella

  • A Meditation on Four Senses of ‘Light’

    Substack latest

    Bill Vallicella

  • Recognition, Attention, William Wordsworth, and Samuel Alexander

    As social animals we have a legitimate need for recognition by others. This need is not a mere desire for attention. Parents and teachers harm a child when they dismiss the legitimate need for recognition and respect as a bid for attention. A child so maligned may father a man who is more monster than man. 

    ……………………..

    "The child is father of the man" is from William Wordsworth's 1802 poem, "My Heart Leaps Up."

    My Heart Leaps Up

    My heart leaps up when I behold
    A rainbow in the sky:
    So was it when my life began;
    So is it now I am a man;
    So be it when I shall grow old,
    Or let me die!
    The Child is father of the Man;
    And I could wish my days to be
    Bound each to each by natural piety.

    My allusion to Wordsworth above extends, and some will say, 'distorts,'  the meaning of his "The Child is Father of the Man." 

    I learned the phrase "natural piety" from Samuel Alexander, but now I see where Alexander found it.

    Samuel Alexander, Space, Time, and Deity, vol. II, Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1979, (originally published in 1920), p. 46:

    The higher quality emerges from the lower level of existence and has its roots therein, but it emerges therefrom, and it does not belong to that lower level, but constitutes its possessor a new order of existent with its special laws of behaviour.  The existence of emergent qualities thus described is something to be noted, as some would say, under the compulsion of brute empirical fact, or, as I would prefer to say in less harsh terms, to be accepted with the "natural piety" of the investigator.  It admits no explanation.

    If, however, the emergent entities admit of no explanation, if their emergence is a brute fact, then claims of emergence are open to the 'poof' objection.  It would appear to be rather unbecoming of a hard-assed physicalist to simply announce that such-and-such has emerged when he can offer no explanation of how it has emerged.  If interactionist dualists are supposed to be embarrassed by questions as to how mind and body interact, then emergentists are in a similar boat.

    That being said, "natural piety" is a beautiful phrase.

    Bill Vallicella

  • Facebook Latest: Princeton Drops Greek and Latin Requirement for Classics Degree

    Here

    I've been saying it for years: A 'LIBERAL' IS ONE WHO HAS NEVER MET A STANDARD HE DIDN'T WANT TO ERODE. I suppose it is all in pursuit of that beautiful thing they call 'equity,' that is, equality of result or outcome. Mathematics  is called 'racist' because blacks as a group are not good at it compared to Asians, Jews, and whites. Could the same motive be operative in this case? 

    Bill Vallicella

  • An Ecclesiological Contretemps: Edward Feser versus Rod Dreher

    Start here with Dreher.  Feser's response to Dreher. Dreher's reply (scroll down). Feser again.

    ……………………………

    Addendum 5/31. Dr. Vito Caiati, historian, comments (minor edits added by BV):

    With regard to the exchange between Edward Feser and Rod Dreher on the latter’s rationale for leaving Roman Catholicism for Orthodoxy, which I too have been closely following, I have an observation that may be worthy of your notice.

    While I believe that Feser exposes the non-rational and hence inadequate motivation for Dreher’s apostasy (and Skojec’s crise de foi), he advances an argument regarding the present theological and ecclesial crisis of the Catholic Church that is not at all cogent or convincing. This is evident [from the] the essential equivalence he draws between it and earlier disputes and conflicts in the Church’s distant history. He writes:

    Skojec is scandalized by the fact that the confusion and heterodoxy fostered by Pope Francis’s many doctrinally problematic statements have not yet been remedied despite his having been in office for eight years.  This is quite ridiculous.  Eight years is nothing in terms of Church history.  The utter chaos introduced into the governance of the Church by Pope Stephen VI’s lunatic Cadaver Synod lasted for decades.  So did the chaos of the Great Western Schism.  Pope Honorius’s errors were not condemned until forty years after his death.  Further examples could easily be given.  Few people remember these events now, because things eventually worked themselves out so completely that they now look like blips.  If the world is still here centuries from now, Pope Francis’s chaotic reign will look the same way to Catholics of the future. 

    Leaving aside the question of whether relevant “further examples [that] could easily be given,” is it in fact the case that the nature of the contemporary crisis in the Church is essentially of a kind with the three cited medieval crises? In other words, is something going on at the present moment, under the present pope, and more broadly in the decades that stretch back well into the last century that indicates some fundamental rupture with traditional Roman Catholic thought and practice? Are we indeed simply witnessing events that, like those of the past, will “look like blips” in time, or are we, undergoing a unique crisis that, in the words of historian Roberto Pertricci, “segna il tramonto di quell’imponente realtà storica definibile come ‘cattolicesimo romano’” [‘marks the sunset of that imposing historical reality that can be defined as Roman Catholicism’]?

    The histories of the three medieval crises mentioned by Feser are highly [complicated?]and resistant to rapid summary. Suffice it to say, that two of these, the Cadaver Synod of 897 [and] Great Western Schism (1378-1417) were the offshoots of political and dynastic conflicts among orthodox members of the Catholic household of Europe. Neither involved questions of dogma or doctrine, and if the latter was troubling for papal power and prestige, encouraging the conciliarism of the 15th century and the graver Protestant challenge of the 16th, its more long-term [effects?] were not. The case of Pope Honorius I (625-38) involves a letter written in 635 by this early medieval pontiff to Sergius, the Patriarch of Constantinople, who successfully solicited Honorius’ support for the conciliatory position that he, following the Emperor Heraclitus, had adopted toward monothelitism to promote unity among his flock. Honorius was condemned by the Third Council of Constantinople (680-81) not for heresy but for allowing its propagation. Here, although the dispute was doctrinal in nature, touching on the Chalcedonian understanding of Christ’s two natures and two wills, we are dealing with an isolated, although fundamental doctrinal misjudgment, expressed in a letter that is otherwise orthodox, of a pope who was highly regarded during his reign and who manifested no other signs of heterodoxy.

    I think that even this highly unsatisfactory summary of these distant events in the life of the Church is sufficient to set them apart from the events of our own time and particularly those under the present pope. There is no need to catalogue the questionable if not heretical statements and judgments of Bergoglio, all designed to encourage confusion and heterodoxy in the Church; his scandalous actions paying homage to pagan idols; his  protection and advancement of sexual predators and sodomites; his purges of orthodox prelates and laymen from important Vatican positions and commissions; his undermining of Church unity to the extent that the German Church is in actual, if not declared schism; his collaboration in the destruction of the loyal Catholic Church in China; his incessant attacks on orthodox Catholics; and his substitution of left wing politics for the Gospel. But more beyond the actions of this pope we have to take note of the systemic rot throughout so much of the Church that has made him and those of his ilk possible; everything from the protection of sexual predators, to the abandonment of Catholic teaching in the Church’s schools and universities, to the passivity of most bishops when confronted with heresy in the Church or public scandal (communion for those who advocate and advance abortion, for instance), and so on.  

    What is going on now, right before our eyes will never become some historical “blip.” The magisterium, both ordinary and extraordinary, may still stand, but how long will this be the case if it is increasingly ignored, subverted, and questioned? If the words of the Pater Noster, which are clear in both Greek and Latin, can be altered at will to make them more theologically acceptable to the bien pensant, what is beyond the reach of “reform”? Thus, those who remain loyal to the Church should have no illusions about the uniquely destructive nature of this crisis. It is being advanced by dangerous “progressive” forces, increasingly aligned with the global Left, that have taken control of the leading institutions of the Church and whose objective is the eradication of the very core of traditional Roman Catholic thought and practice.

    Bill Vallicella

  • Why Did Thomas Aquinas Leave his Summa Theologiae Unfinished?

    Burnout or visio mystica? Substack latest.

    Bill Vallicella

  • It Ain’t Necessarily So: On Not Confusing the Modal with the Temporal

    If someone says, ‘Houses sell above the asking price around here,’ it is idiomatically correct, if not quite grammatical, to respond, ‘Not necessarily’ or 'It ain't necessarily so.' ‘Not necessarily’ in this context means not always. Its meaning is not modal, but temporal: there are times when the houses sell above asking price, and times when they do not.

    In ordinary English, the confusion of the temporal ‘always’ with the modal ‘necessarily’ is not often a problem. But in more abstruse contexts, the distinction must be made. Suppose A asks, ‘Why does the universe exist?’ and receives the reply from B, ‘Because it always existed.’ This does not constitute a good reply even if it is true that the universe always existed. The reason is because a thing’s having existed at every past time gives no good answer to the question as to why it exists at all. Even if the past is infinite, the reply is defective. For even if (i) there is no past time at which the universe does not exist, and (ii) no metrically first moment of time, one can still reasonably ask: ‘But why does the universe exist at all?’ ‘Why not no universe?’

    Bill Vallicella

    11 responses to “It Ain’t Necessarily So: On Not Confusing the Modal with the Temporal”

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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