Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

  • Trump Delivers Once Again and Ends AFFH

    This is a major victory against the Left.  Stanley Kurtz:

    I am pleased to report that President Trump and Secretary Carson have together put an end to the Obama-Biden administration’s wildly radical Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) rule. President Trump has delivered on this issue in a way that will preserve American liberty in general, and the freedom and self-government of America’s suburbs in particular.

    Perhaps you saw Kurtz on Life, Liberty, and Levin last night. An impressive guest on the best political show on TV. 

    Bill Vallicella

  • Cancel the New York Times!

    Richard Samuelson, Claremont Review of Books

    Bill Vallicella

  • La Decadenza

    Dr. Vito Caiati writes:

    Relevant to your post “The ‘Catholic’ ‘Universities’ Have Become Jokes: Fordham,” I call your attention to an interview by Marco Tossati of Archbishop Viganò, defender of the faith, on the evil that permeates the Bergoglian regime and the much of the Church, the “three elements” of which the latter characterizes as “heresy, sodomy, and corruption –[which] are so recurrent that they are almost a trademark of the deep state and of the deep church.”

    As the interview, The Pope and the Sodomites, makes clear, here, we are generally dealing not with what you term “the unwitting agents of the demonic” but rather with fully conscious ones, who are bringing one of the greatest institutions and religious traditions of our civilization to ruin.  The cycle of decay in the Church and in Western society at large is rapidly accelerating . The moral horrors and violence that we are now witnessing in society, culture, and politics, orchestrated by the Left,  were largely unimaginable only a few years ago. This is not going to end well. “Saint Michael, the Archangel, defend us in battle against the wickedness and snares of the devil….”

    I too do not see how this can end well.  The Left is now drawing from a cesspool of nihilism that  is reasonably viewed as literally demonic. The Unholy Spirit of he who "always negates" presides over them. But I still maintain that most of the agents of destruction "know not what they do":  they are foolish, pampered youth, products of an affluent and permissive society, brought up with no moral training by materialistic parents . . . in short, useful idiots, or as I say,  useless idiots.

    Bill Vallicella

  • BLM is Playing by the Book. Alinsky’s Book

    Michael Brown:

    In his insightful, 2009 mini-book, Barack Obama’s Rules for Revolution: The Alinsky Model, David Horowitz quoted an SDS radical who wrote, “The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.”

    As Horowitz explained, “In other words the cause — whether inner city blacks or women — is never the real cause, but only an occasion to advance the real cause which is the accumulation of power to make the revolution. That was the all-consuming focus of Alinsky and his radicals.”

    When it comes to BLM, the purported issue, namely, that Black Lives Matter, is not the ultimate issue. Instead, a larger cultural revolution is the ultimate issue. (As many have noted, the founders of BLM are both Marxists and radical feminists, with two of the three women identifying as queer activists.)

    And so, the mantra that “Black Lives Matter” specifically means blacks who are victims of white police brutality. Black lives in the womb do not matter. Blacks getting gunned down in gang violence do not matter. Black toddlers killed in random shootings do not matter. Not even blacks killed by black police officers matter — at least not nearly as much as blacks killed by white officers.

    Those white officers, in turn, represent the larger system, which, we are told, is fundamentally racist. And it is that system that needs to be overthrown.

    Thus, “The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.”

    Read it all, comrades.

    Bill Vallicella

  • Grammar is Propadeutic to Logic

    So if grammar is 'racist,' then so is logic.

    What is the criterion whereby a subject or activity is deemed 'racist' by leftists?  It appears to be this:  Whatever blacks and other 'people of color' are poor at is 'racist.' 

    And what is at the back of that criterion?  It appears to be the assumption that we are all inherently equal, both as individuals and as groups, in all respects, and not just in respect of political rights.  Now we all believe in equality of rights, such as the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; those among us with experience of life and good sense, however, know that there are all sorts of empirically measurable respects in which individuals and groups are not equal.  To take one of many examples, Asian students are superior to black students in point of knowledge of, and aptitude for, mathematics. 

    Do I need to belabor this point among my astute readers? (Full disclosure: I am not now, and never have been Asian, and it is biologically impossible that I should ever become Asian.)

    But if you foolishly believe that we are all inherently equal in every respect, with the same abilities and interests, then you may be tempted to embrace the following unsound argument:

    A. We are all inherently equal in every respect. But:

    B. This equality does not manifest itself as equality of outcome or result. Therefore:

    C. There has to be a factor that prevents equality of outcome or result. And:

    D. That factor is racism, both individual and 'systemic.'

    This argument is multiply-flawed. But if you read this weblog, that very fact is evidence that you have the mental equipment to determine on your own where the flaws lie.  Why do I have to do all the work?

    Bill Vallicella

  • An Example of White-Supremacist Hate Speech

    This is ugly stuff. You have been warned!  I link to it because of my commitment to free speech and open inquiry.

    Bill Vallicella

  • Thought, Prayer, Meditation

    "Prayer is when night descends on thought." (Alain, as quoted by Albert Camus in The Myth of Sisyphus.) Knowing Alain, he must have intended his aphorism as a denigration of prayer. I see it the other way around. We cannot think our way out of our predicament; thinking merely allows us to map the terrain and discover the impasses.  It is merely a means of "consolidating our perplexities." (E. Cioran). It is the failure of thinking that leads us to pray, and the limitations of prayer that lead us to meditate  and wait, like Weil, in silence.  (Curious it is that Simone Weil was a student of Alain.)

    So I say: Prayer is when night descends on thought, and meditation is when night descends on (discursive) prayer.  But all three are needed for a complete human life. Each of us should aspire to be a thinker, a believer, and a mystic with triple citizenship in Athens, Jerusalem, and Benares.

    Rodin Buddha statue Genuflection

    Bill Vallicella

  • How to Prepare for a Communist Coup

    Good practical advice. I won't summarize it. You read it.  HT: Mendocino Joe.

    Bill Vallicella

  • The Ability to Write and to Comprehend a Good, Long Sentence . . .

    . . . is one mark of an educated mind. You won't learn this in the English Department of Rutgers, however. Example:

    If you value the life of the mind, the pursuit of truth, the acquisition and dissemination of knowledge, high culture and its transmission, in short, the classical values of the university as set forth in such great works as John Henry Cardinal Newman's The Idea of a University,  then you should withdraw all support from the culturally Marxist indoctrination centers that the vast majority of contemporary 'universities' have become.

    A good stylist, I will add, varies the length of his sentences.   (And a good upholder of traditional values insists on his right to use standard English.)

    The 'universities' of the present day are more an impediment to the development of an educated mind than  a help. You don't need them.  Do your bit to defund them.

    Note the difference between 'good, long sentence' and 'good long sentence.'

    Bill Vallicella

  • The ‘Catholic’ ‘Universities’ Have Become Jokes: Fordham

    I continue with the examples. Fordham, the other day:

    Fordham University is persecuting a student for speech that shouldn’t even be all that controversial. Surely the Jesuits who run the school aren’t afraid of honest debate?

    At issue are two Instagram posts last month from Austin Tong, age 21: one implicitly criticizing anti-police protests and another showing himself holding a rifle to memorialize the Tiananmen Square massacre.

    Divest the 'universities.' Enough academentia.

    Bill Vallicella

  • Is ‘Looters’ Racist?

    But of course!

    Blacks are 'over-represented' among looters. It would be racist to hold blacks to civilized standards of behavior because such behavior is not 'who they are.' Therefore, any use of 'looters' is racist.

    Is that the 'reasoning'? I'm just asking.  See here:

    At the Los Angeles Times, for instance, an editor has said the word “looters,” which has been used many times in the paper, now has “a pejorative and racist connotation” and that anyone who is inclined to use the word should “talk to your immediate supervisor.” Translation: Best not use the word at all, if you want to stay employed. So what to call looters? Non-paying shoppers? That doesn’t quite tell the story: Ordinary shoplifters don’t usually bust up all the windows. How about self-appointed retail-justice-commandos? Revolutionary mass goods-redistribution agents?

    'Liberals' can't think, but they are really good at associational slides. Their thinking is slurry and surreal and 'morphy' and muddled. One thing reminds them of another and morphs into it.   Their 'thinking' is feculent, a byproduct — of con-fusion.  An intercranial crapstorm. Foolish and flushable.

    'Blacklist' is another word the Pee-Cee Brigade wants to ban.  But then what about 'white out' and 'red line' and 'brown nose' and 'Code Yellow'?

    'Liberals' need re-education. We'll begin building the camps at the start of Trump's third term.  He will no doubt get a third term by simply refusing to leave. Ask Nancy Pelosi. 

    Bill Vallicella

  • If We Lose Locke, We Lose America

    Ben Shapiro, Prager U, 5:05.

    Bill Vallicella

  • An Atheological Argument from the Evil of Radical Skepticism

    Bradley Schneider sends this argument of his devising:

    Premise 1: If God exists, God has the power to eliminate/overcome/defeat any evil in reality without creating more evil (i.e., God and evil can coexist but God should prevail over evil in the end).

    Premise 2: Radical skepticism about the world is an evil (NOT that radical skeptics are evil; rather, our inability to counter radical skepticism and to be sure about our knowledge of reality is an evil).

    Premise 3: God cannot eliminate radical skepticism without overriding free will (creating another evil) — e.g., a skeptic who dies and goes to heaven may still not be convinced that he or she is not under an illusion created by a Cartesian demon; heaven could be part of the illusion.

    Conclusion: God does not exist.

    I accept the first two premises. With respect to the second, I have long believed that our deep and irremediable ignorance on matters of great importance to us is a major evil and germane both to the case for God's nonexistence, but also to the anti-natalist case.  (Atheists who argue to the nonexistence of God from evil ought to consider whether the manifold evils of this world don't also put paid to the notion that human life is worth living and propagating.)

    I balk, however, at the third premise. Schneider seems to be assuming that the origin of radical skepticism is in a free decision not to accept some putative givenness.  There is, I admit, the willful refusal on the part of certain perverse individuals to accept the evident, and even the self-evident; as I see it, however, the origin of radical skepticism is not in a free refusal to accept what is evident or self-evident, but in a set of considerations that the skeptic finds compelling.  A skeptic is not a willful denier, but a doubter, and indeed one whose doubt is in the service of cognition. He doesn't doubt for the sake of doubting, but for the sake of knowing. The skeptic wants to know, but he has high standards: he wants objective certainty, not mere subjective conviction. He doubts whatever can be doubted in order to arrive at epistemic bedrock.  This is what motivates the hyperbolic doubt of the Dream Argument and the considerations anent the evil genius.

    I therefore reject the claim that "God cannot eliminate radical skepticism without overriding free will . . . ."  Free will doesn't come into it. Heaven is the Beatific Vision, and in that vision there will be such a perfect coalescence of finite knower and Infinite Object that no doubt can arise. In the visio beata, radical skepticism will not be possible.  A mundane analog is supplied by the experience of a sensory quale such as a felt pain, or rather pleasure.  In the moment that one feels it, one cannot doubt it, so long as one attends to its phenomenal features alone and brackets (in Husserl's sense) all external considerations as to causes, effects, etc.  The phenomenology is indubitable whatever may be the case with the etiology.

    So if heaven is the Beatific Vision, heaven cannot be illusory.  But this highly refined, highly Platonic, Thomist take on heaven is not for everyone. It is not for Protestants whose conception is cruder.  I call that conception Life 2.0 and I contrast in with the Thomist conception in Conceiving the Afterlife: Life 2.0 or Beatific Vision ?  On a crude conception, according to which Jethro will be united after death with his faithful hound 'Blue,' drink home brew, and hunt rabbits, there is room for illusion.  It could be that there is a whole series of quasi-material 'spiritual' heavens above the sublunary but shy of the ultimate heaven of the Beatific Vision, but I won't pursue that speculation here.

    It just so happens that I am now reading Pierre Rousselot, Intelligence (Marquette UP, 1999), which is a translation of L'Intellectualisme de Saint Thomas. On p. 35, we read:

    By a profoundly logical coincidence the beatific vision, which is the final cause of the world and ultimate perfection of the created spirit, is also, according to Thomas, the only example of a created knowledge other than the intuitions of personal consciousness which seizes and possesses being such as it is, directly, not only without abstraction but with no mediation whatever. The beatific vision is perfect intellection with regard both to its object and to its mode of operation; on this account we must study it here; otherwise it would be impossible to have an exact idea of what intellection is in itself.

    This text supports my analogy above. "The intuitions of personal consciousness" are the felt qualia I referred to.  These are "created knowledges" Writ Very Small, paltry sublunary analogs (e.g., the smell of burnt toast) of the ultimate coalescence of subject and object in the visio beata. But in both the sublunary and beatific cases, Being (esse) is seized and possessed directly, not via abstract concepts and without the mediation of epistemic deputies and mediators.  Being is grasped itself and not via representations. The little mysticisms of sensation prefigure the Big Mysticism of Ultimate Beatitude.

    My prose is starting to 'flow French,' but I trust you catch my drift.

    Beatific Vision

     

    Bill Vallicella

    8 responses to “An Atheological Argument from the Evil of Radical Skepticism”

  • Defund the ‘Universities’ If You Value the Life of the Mind

    If you value the life of the mind, the pursuit of truth, the acquisition and dissemination of knowledge, high culture and its transmission, in short, the classical values of the university as set forth in such great works as John Henry Cardinal Newman's The Idea of a University,  then you should withdraw all support from the culturally Marxist indoctrination centers that the vast majority of contemporary 'universities' have become.

    Not to mention that they have become a scam and a sham as is widely recognized:

    As recently as 1980, you could get a four-year bachelor’s degree at a public school for less than $10,000. These days, it’ll cost you $40,000 at a minimum, $140,000 for a private school, or well over $250,000 for a top school.

    College costs have ballooned beyond all reason. They’ve risen even faster than healthcare costs, which is really saying something. Kids are burying themselves in debt—$1.6 trillion at last count—in order to attend college.

    When I wrote about this last year, I had little hope things would change anytime soon. Why? It’s a tough sell to convince an 18-year-old kid not to attend the four-year party all his friends are going to, especially when the US government is financing it through student loans.

    The Corona virus, however, will play a major role in bringing down the leftist seminaries:

    Mark my words: coronavirus will be remembered for transforming college forever. The virus has forced practically every college to move their courses online for the next semester. So instead of living on campus and walking to lectures, kids will be sitting in their bedrooms watching professors on Zoom calls.

    This is FAR more disruptive than most folks realize. College is about much more than just the learning. There’s the education, and then you have the experience. The learning part has barely changed in a century. Kids still sit in 60-year-old lecture halls listening to professors.

    But now, the “experience” has been stripped away. Do you think teenagers will be willing to mortgage their futures in order to watch college lecture videos on the internet?

    Read it all.

    Bill Vallicella

  • What is Islam?

    A religion like the other great religions?  A Christian heresy? A totalitarian political ideology masquerading as a religion? A hybrid political-religious ideology?

    Islam is Government.

    Bill Vallicella

Latest Comments

  1. Bill, One final complicating observation: The pacifist interpretation of Matt 5:38-42 has been contested in light of Lk 22: 36-38…

  2. The Kant-Swedenborg relation is more complicated than I thought. https://philarchive.org/archive/THOTRO-12

  3. Ed, Just now read the two topmost articles on your Substack. I’m a Kant scholar of sorts and I recall…

  4. Hi Ed, Thanks for dropping by my new cyber pad. I like your phrase, “chic ennui.” It supplies part of…

  5. Very well put: “phenomenologists of suburban hanky-panky, auto dealerships, and such.” In my student years reading Updike and Cheever was…

  6. Bill, I have been looking further into Matt 5: 38-42 and particularly how best to understand the verb antistēnai [to…

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

  9. 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

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

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