Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains
A concealing, concealment, hiding, veiling. Antonym: revelation.
My example: Her selective self-revelation was as much an intended obvelation.
Example from Stewart Umphrey, Complexity and Analysis, Lexington Books, 2002, 140:
Since divine revelation is never without obvelation, those bound back to God in inquiry need a hermeneutics to distinguish what belongs to Him from what belongs to the medium of His self-presentation.
The author offers a cognitivist as opposed to expressivist analysis of 'asshole' and other foul words. But the guy is a 'liberal,' as witness the following bit of squeamishness:
(2) pejorative terms, which assume false normative or moral claims about certain independently identifiable groups of people (e.g., "honkey”, "wop”, "kike”, “limey”, "chink”, "n—-r");
He refuses to write out 'nigger' as he does in the other cases. Why not? The author is well aware of the use-mention distinction. He knows that to talk about a word is not thereby to apply it to someone or something. Why is 'nigger' more offensive than 'kike'? Why the double standard?
The author appears to be 'p.c.-whipped.'
The elimination of the causes of grievance does little to dampen demand for the need to feel aggrieved, a demand the Left is ever eager to supply, especially in matters racial.
(My formulation of a Larry Elders riff.)
In human relations an excess of past often insures an absence of future. Newly-minted friendships, however, are pregnant with future but at risk in an age of abortion.
Marlene Dietrich, Die Fesche Lola. 'Fesche' means something like smart, snazzy.
Ich bin die fesche Lola, der Liebling der Saison!
Ich hab' ein Pianola zu Haus' in mein' Salon
Ich bin die fesche Lola, mich liebt ein jeder Mann
doch an mein Pianola, da laß ich keinen ran!
Kinks, Lola. From the days when 'tranny' meant transmission.
Marlene Dietrich, Muss I Denn
Elvis Presley, Wooden Heart
Lotte Lenya, September Song
Lotte Lenya, Moon of Alabama
Doors, Roadhouse Blues
Bette Midler, Mambo Italiano. Video of Sophia Loren.
Franz Kafka ruminates in this 1922 diary entry on the problem of procreation and dreams of a bourgeois rootedness that probably would have suffocated him:
The infinite, deep, warm, saving happiness of sitting beside the cradle of one’s child opposite its mother.
There is also in it something of this feeling: matters no longer rest with you, unless you wish it so. In contrast, this feeling of those who have no children: it perpetually rests with you, whether you will or no, every moment to the end, every nerve-racking moment, it perpetually rests with you, and without result. Sisyphus was a bachelor.
(Franz Kafka: The Diaries 1910-1923, ed. Max Brod, New York: Schocken, 1975, p. 401.)
The following is excerpted from a November 2004 entry on my first weblog. I like Stove's political conservatism but I don't much cotton to his positivism. The original entry of 2004 is prefaced with a polemical screed in which I denounce Stove as an anti-philosopher, and with some justice. But nowadays I direct my polemic only against my political enemies, holding, as I have for quite a few years now, that polemic has no place in philosophy proper.
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My focus will be on The Plato Cult (Basil Blackwell, 1991), and for now mainly the preface thereto. Stove tells us that "the few pages of this preface will be sufficient to make clear what my view is, and even, I believe, to justify it." (p. vii) His view is "best called positivistic." (ibid.) The "basic proposition of Positivism" is that "there is something fearfully wrong with typical philosophical theories." (p. xi, italics in original) Stove claims to "prove" this thesis. (ibid.) From Stove’s perspective, "what a spectacle of nightmare-irrationality is the history of philosophy!" (p. xi)
We are all familiar with A. N. Whitehead’s remark that "The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato." (Process and Reality, p. 39). Whitehead meant this in praise of Plato. For Stove, however, Plato, Plotinus, Augustine, Berkeley, and a host of other philosophers deemed great, are "dangerous lunatics." (p. 184) They espouse views that cannot be taken seriously by any sane person. Let us consider what Stove has to say about Berkeley:
Berkeley held that there are no physical objects: that there was no right hand behind his ideas of his left hand, no wig behind his ideas of his wig, and so on. Indeed, he said, there is nothing at all behind any of our ideas of physical objects, except the will of God that we should have those ideas when we do. Yet Berkeley was a physical object himself, after all – born of a certain woman, author of certain printed books, and so forth – and he knew it. (p. ix)
Stove’s misunderstanding is so deep that it takes the breath away. Berkeley did not hold that there are no physical objects; what he gave us was a theory of their ontological constitution. That there are physical objects is self-evident, a datum, a starting point; what they are, and how they exist, however, are questions open to dispute. To deny the existence of physical objects would of course be lunacy. But to give an analysis of them in terms of ideas, an analysis that identifies them with clusters of coherent ideas, is not a lunatic project. It is no more a lunatic endeavor than that of analyzing thoughts (and mental states generally) in terms of brain states.
Suppose we explore this comparison a bit. It is prima facie reasonable to hold that our thoughts are identical with complex states of our brains. (I don’t think that this is true, and I think that there are formidable arguments to the contrary, but the reasonable and the true are two, not one.) Accordingly, my thinking about Stove is a state of my brain. Suppose a philosopher propounds the following theory: Every (token) mental state is numerically identical to some (token) brain state. Someone who holds such a token-token identity theory is obviously not denying the existence of mental states; what he is doing is presupposing their existence and giving us a theory of what they are in ultimate reality. What he is saying is that these mental states of which we are introspectively aware are really just brain states; they are not states of an immaterial thinking substance. (One could of course argue that this identity theory is unstable and, given a few pokes, topples over into eliminativism about the mental; to discuss this instability, however, is beyond the scope of this entry.)
Now if the project of reducing the mental to the physical avoids lunacy, then the same goes for the reduction in the opposite direction. If it is not ‘loony’ to say that the perceiving of a coffee cup is a state of my brain, why is it ‘loony’ to say that the coffee cup perceived is a bundle or cluster of ideas (to be precise: accusatives of mental acts)? Either both of these views belong in the lunatic asylum or neither do.
Note also that if one cannot analyze the physical in terms of the mental, or the mental in terms of the physical, on pain of going insane, then one also cannot analyze the universal in terms of the particular, or the particular in terms of the universal. And yet philosophers do this all the time without seeming to lose their grip on reality.
Take the obvious fact that things have properties. These two tomatoes are both (the same shade of) red. That things have properties is a datum; what properties are, however, and how they exist, is not a datum but a problem. It appears that our two tomatoes have something in common, namely, their being red. This suggests that redness is a universal, an entity repeated in each of the tomatoes. Some philosophers resist this suggestion by maintaining that, although both tomatoes are red, each has its own redness. They then analyze the seeming commonality of redness in some other way, say, as deriving from a mental act of abstraction, r in terms of trope resemblance-classes.
Metaphysical reductions (of the mental to the physical, the physical to the mental, the universal to the particular, the particular to the universal, the modal to the non-modal, the normative to the non-normative, etc.) seem to be as meaningful as scientific reductions. The identification of lightning with an atmospheric electrical discharge; of a puddle of water with a collection of H20 molecules; of a light beam with a stream of photons – none of these identifications are intended by their proponents as lunatic denials of the phenomena to be reduced. There are of course interesting questions about when identifications collapse into eliminations; but the point here is that no denial of existence is intended.
Philosophers, like scientists, are not in the business of denying obvious facts; they are out to understand them. The project of understanding aims at the reality behind the appearance. Stove cannot seem to wrap his mind around this simple notion.
I may have more to say about Stove later. He is dangerous enough to be worth taking apart piece by piece. One good thing about him, though: he is politically conservative. (I left the political tone of this last paragraph in place to give you a flavor of the original.)
Theme music: Eagles, Take it Easy
But, while David has never aspired to put the world right by philosophy, the world for its part has not been equally willing to let him and philosophy alone in return. Quite the reverse. His tenure of the Chair turned out to coincide with an enormous attack on philosophy, and on humanistic learning in general: an attack which has proved to be almost as successful as it was unprecedented.
This attack was begun, as everyone knows, by Marxists, in support of North Vietnam’s attempt to extend the blessings of communism to the south. The resulting Marxisation of the Faculty of Arts was by no means as complete as the resulting Marxisation of South Vietnam. But the wound inflicted on humanistic learning was a very severe one all the same. You could properly compare it to a person’s suffering third-degree burns to 35 per cent of his body.
After the defeat of America in Vietnam, the attack was renewed, amplified, and intensified, by feminists. Their attack has proved far more devastating than that of the Marxists. Lenin once said, “If we go, we shall slam the door on an empty house”; and how well this pleasant promise has been kept by the Russian Marxists, all the world now knows. It is in exactly the same spirit of insane malignancy that feminists have waged their war on humanistic learning; and their degree of success has fallen not much short of Lenin’s. Of the many hundreds of courses offered to Arts undergraduates in this university, what proportion, I wonder, are now not made culturally-destructive, as well as intellectually null, by feminist malignancy and madness? One-third? I would love to believe that the figure is so high. But I cannot believe it.
David did all that he could have done, given the limits set by his position and his personality, to repel this attack. Of course he failed; but then, no one could have succeeded. What he did achieve was a certain amount of damage-limitation. Even this was confined to the philosophy-section of the front. On the Faculty of Arts as a whole, David has had no influence at all—to put it mildly. In fact, when he spoke at a meeting of the Faculty, even on subjects unrelated to the attack, you could always have cut the atmosphere with a knife. It is a curious matter, this: the various ways inferior people have, of indirectly acknowledging the superiority of others, even where no such acknowledgment is at all intended by the inferior, or expected by the superior.
By the end of 1972, the situation in the philosophy department had become so bad that the splitting of the department into two was the only way in which philosophy at this university could be kept alive at all. In this development, David was the leading spirit, as his position and personality made it natural he should be. Of course he did not do it on his own. Pat Trifonoff’s intelligence and character made her an important agent in it. Keith Campbell’s adhesion to our side, after some hesitation, was a critical moment. But while I and certain others were only casting about for some avenue of escape, David never gave up. He battled on, and battled on again, and always exacted the best terms, however bad, that could be got from the enemies of philosophy.
The result of the split was far more happy than could have been rationally predicted at the time. In fact it was a fitting reward for David’s courage and tenacity. For the first twenty years of the new Department of Traditional and Modern Philosophy have been fertile in good philosophy, to a degree unparalleled in any similar period in this or any other Australian university. The department has also enjoyed a rare freedom from internal disharmony. As I have often said, it is the best club in the world, and to be or have been a member of it is a pleasure as well as a privilege.
There will certainly be no adequate official acknowledgment, from anyone inside the university, of what is owed to David. What could someone like the present Vice-Chancellor possibly care about the survival of humanistic learning, or even know about philosophy, or history, or literature? Anyone who did would never have got a Vice-Chancellor’s job in the first place. If there is any acknowledgment forthcoming from the Faculty of Arts, David will be able to estimate the sincerity of it well enough. It will be a case of people, who smiled as they watched him nearly drowning in the boiling surf of 1967–72, telling him how glad they were when, against all probability, he managed to make it to the beach.
But anyone who does know and care about philosophy, or does care about the survival of humanistic learning, will feel towards him something like the degree of gratitude which they ought to feel.
Here (HT: Karl White):
Let me, however, add one more observation that will seem insufferably pompous or a little insane: to wit, that the argument I make in my book—that Christianity can be a coherent system of belief if and only if it is understood as involving universal salvation—is irrefutable. Any Christian whom it fails to persuade is one who has failed to understand its argument fully. In order to reject it, one must also reject one or another crucial tenet of the faith. The exits have all been sealed. I suppose I could be wrong about that, but I do not believe it likely.
Hart seems not to have noticed that he embraces a logical contradiction when he says that the argument he has given is irrefutable AND that he could be wrong about that. For if an argument is irrefutable, then it cannot be refuted; if, on the other hand, the producer of an argument can be wrong about whether it is irrefutable, then the argument can be refuted. Hence the contradiction: the argument cannot be refuted AND the argument can be refuted.
But a man can be a pompous ass and a blowhard and still have interesting things to say. If you are interested in the question of universal salvation, see Douglas Farrow, Harrowing Hart on Hell in First Things. (HT: Dave Lull)
Leonard Peikoff, Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, Meridian 1993, p. 31:
"Supernatural," etymologically, means that which is above or beyond nature. "Nature," in turn denotes existence viewed from a certain perspective. Nature is existence regarded as a system of interconnected entities governed by law; it is the universe of entities acting and interacting in accordance with their identities. What then is a "super-nature"? It would have to be a form of existence beyond existence; a thing beyond entities; a something beyond identity.
The idea of the "supernatural" is an assault on everything man knows about reality. It is a contradiction of every essential of a rational metaphysics. It represents a rejection of the basic axioms of philosophy . . . .
Is this a good argument? That alone is the question.
It is clear that that there cannot exist anything beyond existence: There exists an x such that x does not exist is a formal-logical or narrowly-logical contradiction. So far, so good. And let us cheerfully acquiesce in Peikoff's definition of 'supernatural' as that which is beyond nature. We also grant that the concept of existence is "the widest of all concepts," one that "subsumes everything." (p. 5) We can even grant that nature is existing things regarded as a system of causally interacting entities governed by natural laws.
All of this granted, it still does not follow that a supernatural entity is an entity beyond entities or an existent beyond existents. For if the concept of existence "subsumes everything" as we just quoted Peikoff as saying, then it subsumes any supernatural entities there might be, whether God or unexemplified universals, or Fregean propositions, or mathematical sets, or Cartesian thinking substances, or states of consciousness if they are naturalistically irreducible, or . . . . All of these categories are categories of the supernatural given Peikoff's use of the term. For the members of these categories, if any, do not belong to the natural world, the world of space-time-matter. Now these categories might be empty, but one cannot show them to be empty by intoning the formal-logical truth that nothing exists beyond existence.
I submit that anyone who carefully reads the above passage and thinks about it objectively will be able to see that Peikoff's argument is a blatant non sequitur. He is making one or the other of the following mistakes. He is either attempting to answer a substantive philosophical question by terminological fiat, or he is equivocating on 'existence.' I will explain each of these in turn.
A. It is illegitimate to attempt to answer a philosophical question by rigging one's terminology in such a way that the answer 'falls out' of the terminology. One cannot legislate the supernatural out of existence by using 'existence' in such a way that only natural items exist. Equally, one cannot legislate the supernatural into existence by a similar move. For example, one cannot define God into existence by saying that God is by definition an existent being since a nonexistent God is not God, and God is God (A is A!).
B. If Peikoff is not making the first mistake, then he is equivocating on 'existence.' That is, he using it in two different senses. He is using it both as the "widest of all concepts" to cover everything that exists, but also in a narrow sense to cover only natural existents.
It is trivially true that there is nothing natural beyond nature, and nothing existent beyond existence. But these trivialities do not supply anyone with a good reason to reject the supernatural. It is because of such shoddy reasoning as I have just exposed that most philosophers have a hard time taking Objectivism seriously. Objectivists should take this in a constructive way: if you want your ideas to gain wider acceptance, come up with better arguments for them.
(Don't complain that I've 'taken Peikoff's argument out of context.' It stands on its own, and if it is bad, no amount of further context will improve it. If I quoted Descartes' Meditation V ontological argument and showed why it is unconvincing would you complain that I had taken it out of context?)
This is an old post from my first blog, dated 3 January 2005, slightly redacted.
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Keith Burgess-Jackson writes:
I have a question for my theistic readers. How do you reconcile the devastation wrought by the tsunami with your belief in an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent being? If God could have prevented the tsunami but didn’t, then God’s omnibenevolence is called into question. If God wanted to prevent the tsunami but couldn’t, then God’s omniscience or omnipotence is called into question. You can’t explain away the evil by citing free will, for no human being brought about the tsunami. (Surely you don’t believe in fallen angels.) Do events like this shake your faith? If not, why not? If death and destruction on this scale don’t make you doubt the existence of your god, what would?
1. The parenthetical material is puzzling. If someone can see his way clear to accepting the existence of a purely spiritual being such as God, then the belief in angels, fallen or otherwise, will present no special problem. Given the existence of fallen angels, the Free Will Defense may be invoked to account for natural evils such as tsunamis: natural evils turn out to be a species of moral evils.
2. Of course, the argument can be turned around. If someone argues from the fact of evil to the nonexistence of God, that person assumes that there is indeed an objective fact of evil, and thus, an objective distinction between good and evil. A sophisticated theist can counterargue that there cannot be an objective distinction between good and evil unless God exists. I could make that argument as rigorous as you like. That is not to say that the argument would be compelling to every rational consumer of it, but only that it would logically impeccable, plausibly premised, and sufficiently strong to neutralize the atheist's argument from evil. I distinguish between refuting and neutralizing. It may be difficult to refute a sophisticated interlocutor since he will not be likely to blunder. But he can be neutralized by presenting counterarguments of equal but opposite probative force. The result is a stand-off: you battle the opponent to a draw.
3. In a separate argument, a theist could make the case that the very quantity and malevolence of the moral evil in the world — think of the 20th century and the crimes of Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Castro, the 100 million murdered by Communists, etc.) — cannot be explained naturalistically. This would be another way to argue from the fact of objective evil to supernatural agents of evil. See my The Holocaust Argument for God's Existence.
4. There is no denying that evil presents a serious challenge to theism. Should it shake the theist's faith? Only if the objections to atheism/naturalism shake the atheist's/naturalist's faith. We seem to have doxastic parity. There are reasons both for and against theism. But there are also reasons both for and against atheism/naturalism. It would be special pleading to suppose that the reasons against theism are much more weighty that the reasons against atheism/naturalism. See my companion post on the naturalist's version of fides quaerens intellectum.
5. At the end of the day, after all the dialectical smoke has cleared, you simply have to decide what you are going to believe and how you are going to live. The decision is not a mere decision, but rationally informed, and subject to revision after the consideration of further arguments; but at some point ratiocination must cease and a position must be taken.
Note: Most atheists are naturalists, hence my conflation of them in this post. But one could be an anti-naturalist and an atheist (McTaggart) and I suppose one could be a theist and a naturalist.
I'm on a roll. Daily punch-back against leftist loons on a wide variety of topics. Culture critique in the bowels of the Zuckerbergian beast. No lefties need apply. I am looking for a few good men and women to join me in the fight for sense and sanity and the defense of the Republic.
I received 'friend' requests from a couple of hotties the other day who proudly strut their stuff and sport their 'racks' on pages including links to their 'nude pics.' Sorry girls, you are not MavPhil material.
Vito, The monastery in question is located in a canyon accessible only by a 13-mile dirt road. Unsecured, anyone could…
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Excellent comments, Vito. Will try to respond tomorrow.
Bill, One final complicating observation: The pacifist interpretation of Matt 5:38-42 has been contested in light of Lk 22: 36-38…
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Ed, Just now read the two topmost articles on your Substack. I’m a Kant scholar of sorts and I recall…
And then there is the Sermon on the Mount. Here is a list of 12 different interpretations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sermon_on_the_Mount