Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

  • Medicare for All?

    Some of the Democrat candidates for president are calling for Medicare for all, in those terms. The call makes no sense. Medicare is a U. S. government program for American citizens 65 years of age and older. (There are minor exceptions that don't affect my main point.) Now even Democrats know that not every citizen is 65 or older. So the call makes no sense for that reason alone.

    If the Dem dogs weren't such lying "pony soldiers" to use Joe Biden's bizarre phrase, if they were intellectually honest, then they would admit to be calling for universal health care, where 'universal' covers citizens and illegal aliens. The mendacious bunch would also own up to wanting a single-payer system, one that outlaws private health insurance. Outlawing private insurers such as Blue Cross/ Blue Shield, Aetna, etc., would do away with the supplemental plans now available to part B Medicare recipients.

    Next Lie: "If you like your plan, you can keep your plan." (Barack Obama)

    Bill Vallicella

  • A Cure for Infatuation?

    DulcineaOne of the very best is marriage. 

    Infatuation is a form of idolatry that cannot last long in a marriage. Marriage cures it. That's an argument for marriage. There was no cure for Don Quixote's romantic fantasies because their object, the fair Dulcinea del Toboso, existed only in his imagination.*

    But while infatuation lasts, it is blissful. One is made silly, often harmlessly so. One walks on air and can think of nothing but the beloved. The moon hits your eye like a bigga pizza pie. The world starts to shine like you've had too much wine. So smitten was I in the early days of my relationship to the woman I married that I sat in my carrel at the university one day and just thought about her for eight hours straight when I was supposed to be finishing an article on Frege. Life is both love and logic. But sometimes hot love trumps cold logic.

    The best marriages begin with the romantic transports of infatuation, but a marriage lasts only if the Rousseauian transports are undergirded by good solid reasons of the big head without interference from the heart or the little head. The love then matures. Real love replaces illusory idealization. The big head ought to be the ruling element in a man.

    It takes an Italian to capture the aforementioned romantic transports, and Dean Martin (Dino Crocetti) does the job well in the schmaltzy That's Amore. 

    Il Mio Mondo is a good expression of the idolatry of infatuation.  Cilla Black's 1964 rendition of the Italian song is You're My World.

    But whence the idealization, the infatuation, the idolatry?  And why the perennial popularity of silly love songs? What we really want in the deepest depths of the heart no man or woman can provide.  That is known to all who know their own hearts and have seen through the idols.  What we want is an infinite and eternal love.  This infinite desire may have no object in reality. Arguments from desire are not rationally compelling.

    But given the fact of the desire, a fact that does not entail the reality of its object, we have what we need to explain the idealization, the infatuation, and the idolatry of the sexual other. We substitute an immanent object for Transcendence inaccessible.

    _____________________________

    *The great novel of Miguel Cervantes is a work of fiction. And so both Don Quixote/Quijote and Dulcinea are fictional characters. But the first is posited as real within the fiction while the other is posited as imaginary, as Don Quixote's fiction, even if based upon the posited-in-the-fiction real Aldonza Lorenzo. Herewith a bit of grist for the mill of the philosophy of fiction. The real-imaginary distinction operates within an imaginary construct.

     

    Bill Vallicella

  • Lie or Exaggeration or Bullshit? Politics in an Age of Bullshit

    A redacted re-post from 30 November 2016

    ………………………………..

    Over the weekend, Donald Trump bragged in signature style that he “won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.” Lefties are calling the statement a lie.  But it is no such thing.  In the typical case, a lie is a false statement made with the intention to deceive.  In the typical case, one who lies knows the truth, but misrepresents it to his audience out of a desire to deceive them.  But no one knows the truth-value of Trump's braggadocious conditional.  It could be true, but neither Trump nor anyone else has any evidence of its truth.  Although verifiable in principle, it is not practically verifiable.

    When lefties call a statement a lie which is not a lie should we say that they are lying about what it is?

    Was Trump exaggerating when he made his remark?  That's not right either.

    I think what we have here is a species of bullshit in the sense pinned down by a noted philosopher.  According to Harry Frankfurt, a  statement is bullshit if it is

    When did the Age of Bullshit begin in American politics?  Perhaps with the inauguration of Bill Clinton.  But it really gets underway with Barack Obama.  Obama is the shuck-and-jive precursor of Trump.  So let's recall some of his antics.

    As Frankfurt points out, the essence of bullshit is a lack of concern for truth.  But truth and consistency are closely related notions.  Two statements are consistent (inconsistent) just in case they can (cannot) both be true.  Now I do not know if there are any cases of Obama contradicting himself synchronically (at a time), but there are plenty of examples of him contradicting himself diachronically.  He said things as a senator the opposite of which he says now.  Victor Davis Hanson supplies numerous examples in Obama as Chaos:

    . . . when the president takes up a line of argument against his opponents, it cannot really be taken seriously — not just because it is usually not factual, but also because it always contradicts positions that Obama himself has taken earlier or things he has previously asserted. Whom to believe — Obama 1.0, Obama 2.0, or Obama 3.0?

    When the president derides the idea of shutting down the government over the debt ceiling, we almost automatically assume that he himself tried to do just that when as a senator he voted against the Bush administration request in 2006, when the debt was about $6 trillion less than it is now.

    The problem here is not merely logical; it is also ethical: the man is not truthful.  Truth, falsity, consistency, inconsistency pertain to propositions, not persons.  Truthfulness, deceitfulness, lack of concern for truth and consistency — these are ethical attributes, properties of persons.  Obama the bullshitter is an ethically defective president.  When Nixon lied, he could be shamed by calling him on it.  That is because he was brought up properly, to value truth and truthfulness.  But the POMO Obama, like that "first black president" Bill Clinton, apparently can't be shamed.  It's all bullshit and fakery and shuckin' and jivin'.  There is no gravitas in these two 'black' presidents, the one wholly white, the other half-white.  Everything's a 'narrative' — good POMO word, that — and the only question is whether the narrative works in the moment for political advantage. A narrative needn't be true to be a narrative, which is why the POMO types like it.  Hanson has Obama's number:

    But a third explanation is more likely. Obama simply couldn’t care less about what he says at any given moment, whether it is weighing in on the football name “Redskins” or the Travyon Martin trial. He is detached and unconcerned about the history of an issue, about which he is usually poorly informed. Raising the debt ceiling is an abstraction; all that matters is that when he is president it is a good thing and when he is opposing a president it is a bad one. Let aides sort out the chaos. Obamacare will lower premiums, not affect existing medical plans, and not require increased taxes; that all of the above are untrue matters nothing. Who could sort out the chaos?

    [. . .]

    The media, of course, accepts that what Obama says on any given day will contradict what he has said or done earlier, or will be an exaggeration or caricature of his opponents’ position, or simply be detached from reality. But in their daily calculus, that resulting chaos is minor in comparison to the symbolic meaning of Obama. He is, after all, both the nation’s first African-American president and our first left-wing progressive since Franklin Roosevelt.

    In comparison with those two facts, no others really matter.

    Bill Vallicella

  • Saturday Night at the Oldies: Rock and Roll Apologetics

    A curious sub-genre of meta-rock devoted to the defense of the devil's music.

    The Showmen, It Will Stand, 1961 

    Bob Seger, Old-Time Rock and Roll

    But does it really "soothe the soul"? Is it supposed to?  For soul-soothing, I recommend the Adagio movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. Adagio molto e cantabile.

    Rolling Stones, It's Only Rock and Roll (but I Like It)

    Electric Light Orchestra, Roll Over, Beethoven.  Amazingly good.  Roll over, Chuck Berry!

    Danny and the Juniors, Rock and Roll is Here to Stay

    Chuck Berry and Friends, Rock and Roll Music

    Off-topic bonus cut:  The Chantels, Look in My Eyes, 1961.  YouTuber comment: "Emanating from the Heart Chakra. Something pop songs rarely do anymore. Feel it?" The popular music of this period had human meaning, coming from the heart and speaking to the heart, even when it passed over into schmaltz and sentimentality.

    Bill Vallicella

  • Are Fascist Antifa Thugs Blind to their Contradictory Behavior?

    A re-titled and redacted version of an entry originally posted 1 September 2017. 

    ………………………

    Yes, says Jonathan Turley:

    At Berkeley and other universities, protesters have held up signs saying “F–k Free Speech” and have threatened to beat up anyone taking their pictures, including journalists. They seem blissfully ignorant of the contradiction in using fascistic tactics as anti-fascist protesters. After all, a leading definition of fascism is “a tendency toward or actual exercise of strong autocratic or dictatorial control.”

    If there is a 'contradiction' involved here it is not logical but practical/pragmatic. In the terminology of the preceding entry, it is not an instance of logical inconsistency, but of inconsistency in the application of a principle or standard.  If the principle is "It is wrong to employ fascist tactics," then the practical contradiction consists in the Antifa thugs' application of the principle to their enemies but not to themselves.   

    But then it dawned on me (thanks to some comments by Malcolm Pollack and 'Jacques' who cannot go by his real name because of the leftist thugs in the academic world) that there is no practical/pragmatic contradiction or double standard here. The Antifa thugs and their ilk operate with a single standard: do whatever it takes to win.

    They don't give a rat's ass about consistency of any kind or the related 'bourgeois' values that we conservatives cherish such as truth.  These values are nothing but bourgeois ideology the function of which is to legitimate the 'oppressive'  institutional structures that the Marxist punks battle against.

    When Turley says that the thugs "seem blissfully ignorant of the contradiction" he assumes that they accept the principle but have somehow failed to realize that they are applying it inconsistently.  But that is not what is going on here. They don't accept the principle!  They have nothing against fascist tactics if they can be employed as means to their destructive ends.  But if the political authorities arrest them and punish them, as they must to maintain civil order,  then they scream Fascism! and dishonestly invoke the principle.

    Besides, they don't accept the meta-principle that one ought to be consistent in the application of principles.

    It is a mistake to think that one can reach these people by appealing to some values we all supposedly share. "Don't you see, you are doing the very thing you protest against!" You can't reach these evil-doers in this way. You reach them by enforcing the law. At some point you have to start breaking heads. But that is not 'fascism,' it is law enforcement.

    If the authorities abdicate, if the police stand idly by while crimes against persons and property are committed, then they invite a vigilante response.  Is that what you want?

    The "Fuck Free Speech" signs make it clear that the Antifa thugs do not value what we value. And because they do not share this classically liberal value, it is a mistake to say that they operate with a double standard: Free speech for me, but not for thee.  They don't value free speech at all; what they value is winning by any means. If there are times and places where upholding free speech is a means to their ends, then they uphold it. But at times and in places where shutting down free speech is instrumentally useful, then they will shut it down. 

    It is right out of the Commie playbook. And just as a Nazi is not the cure for a Commie, a Commie is not the cure for a Nazi.  The cure for both is an American steeped in American values.

    Bill Vallicella

  • Richard Peck, Seeker of Lost Gold

    Superstition Mountain Peck

    (A re-post, with corrections and additions, from 13 January 2010)

    Living as I do in the foothills of the Superstition Mountains, I am familiar with the legends and lore of the Lost Dutchman Gold Mine. Out on the trails or around town I sometimes run into those characters called Dutchman Hunters. One I came close to meeting was Richard Peck, but by the time I found out about his passion from his wife, Joan, he had passed away. Sadly enough, Joan unexpectedly died recently.

    Joan had me and my wife over for dinner on Easter Sunday a few years ago, and my journal (vol. XXI, pp. 34-35, 28 March 2005) reports the following:

    Joan's dead husband Rick was a true believer in the Dutchman mine, and thought he knew where it was: in the vicinity of Weaver's Needle, and accessible via the Terrapin trail. A few days before he died he wanted Joan to accompany his pal Bruce, an unbeliever, to a digging operation which Bruce, a man who knows something about mining, did not perform. Rick to Joan, "I want you to be there when he digs up the gold."

    Richard Peck, 44, is a Princeton graduate, the father of three children and the owner of a Cincinnati advertising agency. He has spent the past 16 months trying to find the famed Lost Dutchman gold mine in Arizona's barren Superstition Mountain range. "The more I read about the Lost Dutchman," he recalls, "the more I kept coming back to it. Finally, I was sure I knew where the Lost Dutchman was. I was going to tear this thing open. I thought I was going to have it wrapped up in two weeks." So far his search has cost him $80,000. "I had to try something like this because it was so impossible. But if this mine is ever found it's still going to hurt in a lot of ways. Something is going to be lost out of this world."

    Bill Vallicella

  • SOTU #3: President Trump in Fine Form

    Donald J. Trump did a great job with his third State of the Union address last night.  He took the high ground and demonstrated that he can rise to the occasion when necessary.  He made no mention of his impeachment by the House or his expected acquittal by the Senate which will be fait accompli by the end of today.  There was also no mention of the Democrats, their witch hunts,  or their obstructionism. He cleaved to the positive the whole time, listing his many accomplishments, both domestic and foreign. Promises made; promises kept; Nancy wept. Or rather grimaced. 

    45 sounded all the right notes on the rule of law, sanctuary jurisdictions, illegal immigration, socialism, abortion, religious liberty, and Second Amendment rights. He said the things that need saying, the very things that  Milque-Toast Mitt and the rest of the go-along-to-get-along Republican pseudo-cons are afraid to say.  He offended all the right people, including Speaker Pelosi behind him and, to his right, the pouting and sullen girly-girl House Democrats all in white as they were last year, putting their female tribalism on display.

    The Orange Man continued in the tradition inaugurated by the great Ronald Reagan in 1982 by honoring ordinary citizens. (Do you remember Lenny Skutnick, who plunged into the icy Potomac to rescue an Air Florida flight victim, and was honored in 1982 by Reagan?)

    But the high point of the accolades was President Trump's bestowal of the Presidential Medal of Freedom on Rush Limbaugh who was recently diagnosed with stage four lung cancer.  Limbaugh is the prime mover behind conservative talk radio which intellectually obtuse and morally defective 'liberals' insist on calling 'hate radio' thereby demonstrating their failure to grasp the distinction between hate and dissent and the important role dissent plays in a healthy republic.

    This blogger enjoyed the 70 or so minute speech immensely. His enjoyment was marred only by his having to look at Nancy Pelosi making faces, chewing her dentures, and looking like the dingbat she is.

    And did you notice how, at the end of the speech, Pelosi tore her copy of the speech transcript in half in front of the whole country? What a nasty, passive-aggressive  joke she is! She will end her career on a very sad note. And it will be quite a moral struggle for this blogger to contain his Schadenfreude.

    Bill Vallicella

  • Over at My Facebook Page . . .

    . . . a discussion rages over whether women should be denied the right to vote.  I defend universal suffrage against certain alt-Right reactionaries. You may send me a 'Friend' request but only if you are broadly conservative or libertarian. No 'progressives' need apply. Life is too short to be wasted on discussions with the terminally benighted and willfully self-enstupidated.  Such destructive fools need either therapy or defeat. Let's hope we can achieve the latter by political as opposed to extrapolitical means.

    Bill Vallicella

  • The Idolatry of the Transient

    It is because we want more than the transient that we cling to it, as if it could substitute for the More that eludes us. And so in some we find an inordinate love of life, a mad clinging to what cannot last and which, from the point of view of eternity, ought not last. I have Susan Sontag and Elias Canetti in mind.

    The mature man, at the end of a long life, having drunk to the lees the chalice  of mortal existence, ought to be prepared bravely to shed the mortal coil like a worn-out coat and sally forth into the bosom of nonbeing, or into regions of reality glimpsed but not known from the vista points of the sublunary trail the end of which is in sight.  

    Bill Vallicella

  • ‘Facially’

    'Facially' is seeing a lot of use recently. I take it to be an English equivalent of prima facie. Some say that we should avoid Latinisms. I say instead: use them sparingly. 

    Bill Vallicella

  • Slow Thought: A Manifesto

    A little squishy and Continental, but worth reading.

    Bill Vallicella

  • Slow Down and Accomplish Non-Accomplishment

    Successfully resisting the hyperkineticism of one's society, saying No to it by  flânerie, studiousness, otium liberale, Thoreauvian stewardship of the moment, traipsing over mountain trails at sunrise and whatnot — this too is a sort of accomplishment.  You have to work at it a bit.  Part of the work is divesting oneself of the expectations of others and resisting their and the larger society's suggestions.  Eradicating one's suggestibility is actually a life-long task, and none too easy.

    The world's a vast project of often useless neg-otiation. It is the enemy of otium, leisure, that basis of culture. (Josef Pieper) There is need of those who will 'otiate' it, enjoying "leisure with a good conscience" to cop a phrase from Nietzsche, that untimely saunterer. 

    Slow down! You'll get to your grave soon enough.  Why rush?  Is the universe in a rush to get somewhere?  It already is everywhere. Are you any less cosmic, you microcosm?

    Bill Vallicella

  • Is There Such a Thing as Metaphysical Explanation?

    M. L. writes,
     
    I've been enjoying your critique of [Peter] van Inwagen. [The reader is presumably referring to  my "Van Inwagen on Fiction, Existence, Properties, Particulars, and Method" in Studia Neoaristotelica: A Journal of Analytical Scholasticism, 2015, vol. 12, no. 2, 99-125]  I was initially astonished at his claim that metaphysics/ontology doesn't explain, but it also got me curious about where the explanation is going on in ontological accounts (especially of properties, however construed).
     
    I'm doing a Ph.D. in metaontology and I'm contrasting neo-Quinean (van Inwagen) and neo-Aristotelian (Lowe) approaches. 
     
    Can you direct me to where you might have written about, if indeed you have, how it is ontology/metaphysics explains?
     
    Well, I haven't discussed the issue head-on in a separate publication, but I have discussed it en passant in various contexts. Below is a re-do of a 2012 weblog entry that addresses the question and may spark discussion. Combox open.
     
    ………………………
     

    Let 'Tom' name a particular tomato.  Let us agree that if a predicate applies to a particular, then the predicate is true of the particular.  Predicates are linguistic items.  Tomatoes are not. If Tom is red, then 'red' is true of Tom, and if 'red' is true of Tom, then Tom is red. This yields the material biconditional

    1. Tom is red iff 'red' is true of Tom.

    Now it seems to me that the following question is intelligible:  Is Tom red because 'red' is true of Tom, or is 'red' true of Tom because Tom is red?  'Because' here does not have a causal sense.  So the question is not whether Tom's being red causes 'red' to be true of Tom, or vice versa.  So I won't speak of causation in this context.  I will speak of metaphysical/ontological grounding.  The question then is what grounds what, not what causes what.   Does Tom's being red ground the application (the being-applied)  of 'red' to Tom, or does the application (the being-applied) of 'red' to Tom ground Tom's being red?

    I am not primarily concerned with the correct answer to this question, but with meaningfulness/intelligibility of the question itself.

    Grounding is asymmetrical: if x grounds y, then y does not ground x.  (It is also irreflexive and transitive.)  Now if there is such a relation as grounding, then there will be a distinctive form of explanation we can call metaphysical/ontological explanation.  (Grounding, even though it is not causation, is analogous to causation, and metaphysical explanation, even though distinct from causal explanation, is analogous to causal explanation.)

    Explaining is something we do: in worlds without minds there is no explaining and there are no explanations, including metaphysical explanations.  But I assume that, if there are any metaphysical grounding relations, then  in every world metaphysical grounding relations obtain.  (Of course, there is no grounding of the application of predicates in a world without languages and predicates, but there are other grounding relations. For example, if propositions are abstract objects that necessarily exist, and some of the true ones need truth-makers, then truth-making, which is a grounding relation, exists in worlds in which there are no minds and no languages and hence no sentences.)

    Grounding is not causation. It is not a relation between event tokens such as Jack's touching a live wire and Jack's death by electrocution.  Grounding is also not a relation between propositions.  It is not a logical relation that connects propositions to propositions.  It is not the relation of material implication, nor is it entailment (the necessitation of material implication), nor any other logical relation wholly situated at the level of propositions.  Propositions, let us assume, are the primary truth-bearers. 

    In our example, grounding is not a relation between propositions — it is not a logical relation — since neither Tom nor 'red' are propositions. 

    I want to say the following.  Tom's being red grounds the correctness of the application of 'red' to Tom.  'Red' is true of Tom because (metaphysically, not causally or logically) Tom is red, and not vice versa.  'Red' is true of Tom in virtue of  Tom's being red.  Tom's being red is metaphysically prior to the truth of 'Tom is red' where this metaphysical priority cannot be reduced to some ordinary type of priority, whether logical, causal, temporal, or what have you.  Tom's being red metaphysically accounts for the truth of 'Tom is red.' Tom's being red makes it the case the 'red' is true of Tom.  Tom's being red makes 'Tom is red' true.  

    I conclude that there is at least one type of metaphysical grounding relation, and at least one form of irreducibly metaphysical explanation. 

    We can ask similar questions with respect to normative properties.  Suppose Jesus commands us to love one another.  We distinguish among the commander, the act of commanding, the content of the command, and the normative property of the commanded content, in this case the obligatoriness of loving one another.  If Jesus is God, then whatever he commands is morally obligatory. Nevertheless, we can intelligibly ask whether the content is obligatory because Jesus/God commands it, or whether he (rightly) commands it because it is obligatory.  The 'because' here is neither causal not logical.  It is metaphysical/ontological.
     
    This of course a variation on the old Euthyphro Dilemma in the eponymous Platonic dialog.
     
    I freely admit that there is something obscure about a grounding relation that is neither causal nor logical. But of course logical and causal relations too are problematic when subjected to squinty-eyed scrutiny. 
     
    I conclude with a dogmatic slogan. Metaphysics without metaphysical explanation is not metaphysics at all.  
    Bill Vallicella

    10 responses to “Is There Such a Thing as Metaphysical Explanation?”

  • What the 2020 Election is About

    "More than anything, this election is about President Trump." (Mara Liasson, NPR, 2/2/2020)

    Not so! The election is a key engagement in the battle for the soul of America. It is not so much about Trump as it is about the defense of our constitutional republic. The Democrat party, in the control of the hard Left, aims to subvert our constitutional order.  They are taking aim at the Electoral College, the Second Amendment, and the First as well. For a leftist, dissent from their positions is 'hate speech.'  The Democrats have become illiberal. Mirabile dictu, conservatives are now the new (classical) liberals! We stand for individual liberty; they for an ever-more invasive State apparatus.

    The Constitution herself is at risk. For despite their mendacious invocations, the Democrats do not care at all about the Constitution, as is evident from their vicious attempts at blocking the Kavanaugh appointment. They oppose the originalism that alone honors our great founding document. The Democrats are also assaulting bedrock American commitments such as limited government, the presumption of innocence, national sovereignty, the rule of law, the very notion of a citizen and the related distinction between legal and illegal immigration. The political weaponization of the impeachment provision of the Constitution is a spectacularly clear example of their destructive leftism. The Democrats embrace such outrages as sanctuary jurisdictions. I could go on.

    So 2020 is not about Trump the man but about the preservation of the Republic. Trump is 'merely' carrying the fight to the Democrats, exposing them for what they are, and teaching fellow Republicans how to develop their political cojones and fight as they must if we of the Coalition of the Sane are to prevail.

    Bill Vallicella

  • ‘Educate’ and ‘Inform’

    To use 'educate' in place of 'inform' shows a lack of education.

    Related: Whitehead on Education and Information

    Bill Vallicella

Latest Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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