Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

  • Suicide

    I cannot erase a truth by erasing the sentence that expresses it; can I erase my self by erasing the body that is its worldly vehicle and expression?

    Filed under: Questions

    Bill Vallicella

  • Truth, Fallibilism, Objectivism, and Dogmatism

    It is important not to confuse the question of the fallibility of our cognitive faculties, including reason, with the question whether there is truth.  Truth is one thing, fallibility another. A fallibilist need not be a truth-denier.  One can be both a fallibilist and an upholder of truth.  What's more, one ought to be both a fallibilist about some, but not all, classes of propositions, and an upholder of the existence of  truth. Indeed, if one is a fallibilist, one who admits that we  sometimes go wrong in matters of knowledge and belief, then then one must also admit that we sometimes go right, which is to say that fallibilism presupposes the existence of truth. If we can be wrong about how Epstein met his end, then we can be right.

    I spoke above of truth sans phrase, without qualification. There is no need to speak of objective or of absolute truth since truth by its very nature is objective and absolute.  Talk of relative truth is incoherent.  Of course, what I accept as true or believe to be true may well be different from what you accept as true or take to be true.  But that does not show that truth is relative; it shows that we differ in our beliefs. Suppose you believe that Hillary Clinton ran a child molestation ring out of a Washington, D. C pizza joint. I don't believe that.  You accept a proposition that I reject. But the proposition itself — that Hillary ran a molestation ring, etc. — is either true or false independently of anyone's belief state.

    So don't confuse being true with being-believed-by-someone-or-other.

    But what about an omnisicent being? Doesn't such a being believe all and only true propositions?  I should think so if the omniscient being has beliefs and has them  in the way we do. But does he believe the truths because they are true, or are they true because he believes them?  This is a nice little puzzle reminiscent of Plato's Euthryphro Paradox, to be found in the eponymous dialog.  (Indeed it has the same structure as that paradox.)  Note that the puzzle cannot get off the ground without the distinction between truth and belief — which is my point, or one of them.

    (Like I said, it's all footnotes to Plato, but it's not all from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains.)

    Just as a fallibilist is not a truth-denier, a truth-affirmer is not an infallibilist or 'dogmatist' in one sense of this word.  To maintain that there is objective truth is not to maintain that one is in possession of it in particular cases.  The upholder of the existence of truth need not be a dogmatist. One of the sources of the view that truth is subjective or relative is aversion to dogmatic people and dogmatic claims.

    But if you reject the existence of objective truth on the basis of an aversion to dogmatic people and claims, then you are not thinking clearly.

    Bill Vallicella

  • Deplatforming

    Deplatforming is the new book burning. Who is is the Nazi now?

    Bill Vallicella

  • The Long and the Short of it

    Life is too short for a proper appreciation of its brevity.

    Bill Vallicella

  • A Reader Weighs in on Dreher and Douthat and the Never Trump Phenomenon

    Dr. Vito Caiati, historian, writes,

    I appreciated your critical post on  Rod Dreher last week. Yesterday (Tuesday, August 6), he was at it again (“The MAGA Kahn & The Abyss’), linking Trump to cultural decline, while exalting a recent column in The New York Times by the never-Trump nincompoop Ross Douthat ("The Nihilist in Chief"), in which he decries "obvious moral vacuum, the profound spiritual black hole, that lies beneath [Trump’s] persona and career.”

    As much as I appreciate Dreher’s work on the corruption in the Catholic Church and the existential dangers of 'woke' culture, his judgments are often suffused with a sanctimonious ahistoricity; thus, he refuses to acknowledge that the only effective responses to the vicious and increasingly violent American left have been those of the uncouth, often inarticulate, street fighter Trump. He is by far not a perfect man, but he is the only man we have; he fights back against the left’s crimes, lies, and violence.

    I think that guys like Dreher who have only a thin knowledge of history are ultimately shocked by hard political and ideological conflict. He likes to pick saints and other less savory figures out of the flow of time and set them up as exemplars of the good and the bad. But history is dense and far more complicated than he imagines, and in times of crisis, Western values and culture have repeatedly been defended and preserved by political and military figures of dubious personal morality.

    Hard times require hard men.

    I agree entirely. But we are left with the task of explaining the Never-Trump mentality. I find the obviously decent and intelligent David Frenches and the Mona Charens among them hard to figure. 

    I respect the high-minded Mona Charen, I applaud the civil courage it took for her to make her CPAC speech last year, and I condemn any thugs who may have threatened her physically for speaking her mind and heart. (According to reports, she was quickly escorted from the venue.) But people like her have no effect on what actually happens and are useless when it comes to defeating the Left. She doesn't understand the nature of politics. It is war, not gentlewomanly debate.  I wish it were the latter, and it could be if we all agreed on fundamentals; but we manifestly don't.  

    You don't like the vulgar Trump? Too bad. He's all we've got, as Caiati says above.  No other Republican has the courage or the ability to accomplish what he has accomplished. Face reality and its limitations. Don't let the best become the enemy of the good. The milque-toast McCains  haven't done jack and won't do jack, except talk and obstruct and aid the enemy. Former red-diaper baby David Horowitz understands the nature of the political:

    The movement galvanized by Trump can stop the progressive juggernaut and change the American future, but only if it emulates the strategy of the campaign: Be on the offense; take no prisoners; stay on the attack. To stop the Democrats and their societal transformation, Republicans must adhere to a strategy that begins with a punch in the mouth. That punch must pack an emotional wallop large enough to throw them off balance and neutralize their assaults. It must be framed as a moral indictment that stigmatizes them in the way their attacks stigmatize Republicans. It must expose them for their hypocrisy. It must hold them accountable for the divisions they sow and the suffering they cause. (Big Agenda, Humanix, 2017, p. 142)

    Trump alone, a political outsider who doesn't need a job, has the civil courage and is in a position to deliver the needed punches. That's why we support him. That's why we overlook his flaws, just as the Democrats overlook the flaws of their candidates. He punches back and accomplishes what the milque-toast Republicans only talk about.

    Charen and French and Co. are intelligent and morally decent. They are not foolish and destructive like Ocasio-Cortez, Gillibrand, Warren, O'Rourke, Booker, Sanders, and Biden.  What the former fail to understand, however, is that their political opponents are in fact domestic enemies who  do not care at all about the values they cherish: civility, decorum, free speech, the rule of law, and the rest. 

    They can't see past Trump's obnoxious mannerisms, and they cannot see into the true nature of their opponents.  They project into their opponents the values that they themselves uphold. Perhaps that is the source of their blindness.

    It's all fascinating even if disturbing, and a plentiful source of grist for the philosopher's and the psychologists' mills.

    Bill Vallicella

  • Desideratum

    Cultivate a critical openness.

    Bill Vallicella

  • Contemporary ‘Liberals’ Have Trouble with Distinctions: Beginning of a Catalog of Examples

    Contemporary 'liberals' (leftists)  seem incapable of distinguishing between

    • nationalism and white nationalism
    • patriotism and jingoism
    • legal and illegal immigration
    • immigration and emigration
    • race and skin color
    • racism and race realism
    • statements whose subject matter is race and racist statements
    • white people and white supremacists
    • legitimate and illegitimate forms of discrimination
    • free speech and hate speech
    • hate and dissent
    • people and propositions
    • democracies and republics
    • fact-stating and emotive uses of language
    • races and religions
    • social constructs and natural realities
    • equality of opportunity and equality of outcome
    • a citizen and a person who happens to be within a nation's geographical boundaries.
    Bill Vallicella

  • Truth No Defense

    The truth is no defense in the court of the politically correct. In present-day academe, all must toe the party line and woe to him who doesn't. The universities have become leftist seminaries.

    Bill Vallicella

  • We are Bothered by Different Things

    Brian Kennedy, A Passion to Oppose: John Anderson, Philosopher, Melbourne University Press, 1995, p. 141:

    Melbourne intellectuals came to regard [John] Anderson 'as the man who had betrayed the Left, a man who had gone over to the other side.  Melburnians wanted Anderson to answer a simple question: was he or was he not interested in the fact that some were very rich and some were very poor?'  To this question Anderson replied that 'we are all bothered by different things.  That finished him with the Melburnians'. [Kennedy quotes Manning Clark, The Quest for Grace, Melbourne, 1991, p. 193]

    "We are all bothered by different things."  And even when we are bothered by the same things, we prioritize the objects of botherment differently.  Now suppose you and I are bothered by exactly the same things in exactly the same order.  There is still room for disagreement and possibly even bitter contention: we are bothered to different degrees by the things that bother us.

    "It angers me that that doesn't anger you!"  "It angers me that  you are insufficiently angered by what angers both of us."

    Here then is one root of political disagreement.  It is a deep root, perhaps ineradicable.  And it is a root of other sorts of disagreement as well.  We are bothered by different things.

    Are conservatives bothered by gun violence?  Yes, of course.  But the Americans among them are bothered more by the violation of the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding citizens. Liberals, even if they are slightly bothered by the violation of these rights, assuming they admit them in the first place, are much more bothered by gun violence.  Now there are factual questions here concerning which agreement is in principle possible, though exceedingly unlikely.  For example there is the question whether more guns in the hands of citizens leads to less crime.   That is a factual question, but one that is not going to be resolved to the satisfaction of all.  Conservatives and liberals disagree about the facts.  Each side sees the other as having its own 'facts.'

    But deeper than facts lie values.  Here the problem becomes truly intractable.  We are bothered by different things because we differ about values and their ordering.  American conservatives and presumably most liberals value self-reliance but conservatives locate it much higher up in the axiological hierarchy.  This probably explains why liberals are more inclined to rely on professional law enforcement for protection against the criminal element even while they bash cops as a bunch of racists eager to hunt down and murder "unarmed black teenagers" such as Michael Brown of Ferguson, Missouri fame.  (Brown was unarmed, but tried to arm himself with the cop's gun. This is an important detail conveniently left out of the biased mainstream media accounts.)

    As for what finished Anderson with the Melburnians, he was apparently not sufficiently exercised by (material) inequality for the tastes of the latter despite his being a man of the Left, though not reliably so due to his iconoclasm.

    Does it bother conservatives that there is wealth inequality?  To some extent.  But for a(n American) conservative, liberty trumps equality in the scale of values.  With liberals it is the other way around.  Liberals of course cherish their brand of rights and liberties and will go to absurd extremes in defending them even when the right to free expression, a big deal with them, spills over into incitement to violence and includes the pollution of the culture with pornography.  Of course, this extremism in defense of free expression bangs up against the liberals' own self-imposed limit of political correctness.  The trashers of Christianity suddenly become cowards when it comes to the trashing of Islam.  That takes more courage than they command.  And they are easily cowed by events such as the 7 January 2015 terrorist attack on Charlie Hebdo in Paris.  Liberals are also absurdly eager to spread the right to vote even at the expense of making the polling places safe for voter fraud.  How else do you explain their mindless opposition to photo ID? But not a peep from liberals about 'real' liberties and rights such as gun rights, the right to private property, and the right to freedom from excessive and punitive taxation.

    Is material inequality a problem?  Not as such.  Why should it be?  

    As I recall John Rawls' Difference Principle, the gist of it is this: Social and economic inequality is justified ONLY IF the inequality makes the worse off better than they would have been without the inequality.  Why exactly?  If I'm smarter than you, work harder, practice the ancient virtues, avoid the vices, while you are a slacker and a screw-up who nevertheless has what he needs, why is my having more justified ONLY IF it makes you better off than you would have been without the inequality? (Yes, I know all about the Original Position and the Veil of Ignorance, but I don't consider that an argument.)

    At the root of our differences are value differences and those, at bottom, are irreconcilable. 

    On that cheery note, I punch the clock. Have a pleasant weekend.

    Bill Vallicella

  • Will Middle America Go Gentle . . .

    . . . into that good night? Patrick Buchanan:

    Writes The New York Times‘ Charles Blow in a column that uses “racist” or “racism” more than 30 times: Americans who do not concede that Trump is a racist—are themselves racists: “Make no mistake. Denying racism or refusing to call it out is also racist.”

    But what is racism?

    Is it not a manifest dislike or hatred of people of color because of their color? Trump was not denouncing the ethnicity or race of Ilhan Omar in his rally speech. He was reciting and denouncing what Omar said, just as Nancy Pelosi was denouncing what Omar and the Squad were saying and doing when she mocked their posturing and green agenda.

    Clearly Americans disagree on what racism is.

    Buchanan's definition is on the right track except that he conflates race with skin color, which is but a superficial phenotypical indicator of race.  He also uses the silly phrase 'people of color.' But let that pass. He's a journalist; what do you expect?  Journalists, lemming-like, tend to repeat what they hear others saying.

    The 'definition' of Omar and the Squad ought to be called a 'daffy-nition.'  You would have to be daft to accept it. To wit:

    A racist is a person who criticizes anything any person of color says or does.

    By this definition, Nancy Pelosi is a racist.  Now Madame Speaker is many things, few of them good; a racist, however, she is not.  If Pelosi is a racist, then we are all racists, and the word has been rendered useless.

    Note also that the Squad definition implies that 'persons of color' can be racists. If Kamala Harris and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortz criticize each other's ideas, then both become racists, despite being 'persons of color'!

    But this contradicts a key tenet of race-baiters, namely, that 'no person of color' can be racist. Such are the wages of stupidity.

    Bill Vallicella

  • Archeologists Discover Long Sought-After Racist Bone

    On Tuesday, in a region of Arizona once known for its Neolithic settlements, a prominent archeology team made a historic discovery when it unearthed a frequently referenced and formerly elusive racist bone (ulnis bigotris).

    And you thought that "He doesn't have a racist bone in his body" was just a manner of speaking?

    Story here.

    Bill Vallicella

  • Facebook

    I'm on a roll. Seven posts today and seven yesterday. 

     

    Bill Vallicella

  • I am not Totally Opposed to Open Borders

    I'm for half-open borders, borders open in the outbound direction.  Anyone who wants to emigrate should be allowed to do so. 

    Communists need walls to keep people in; we need walls to keep them out.  Hence the rank absurdity of the comparison of a wall on our southern border to the Berlin Wall.  Now the mendacious leftists who make this comparison cannot be so historically uninformed as not to see its rank absurdity.  But they make it anyway because they will say or do anything to win.  They are out for power any way they can get it.

    It is interesting that even hate-America leftists do not want to leave the United States. They talk about it, but few do it. And where do they say they will go?

    Canada is high on the list. Why not Mexico? Are they perhaps racists?

    Bill Vallicella

  • Too Many Lawyers in Government, not Enough Doctors

    (Written 10 September 2012)
     
    Negatively, physicians are not lawyers.  Positively, they are scientifically trained without being mere theoreticians: they diagnose, they cut, they sew.  They are the plumbers and the auto mechanics of the mortal coil.  They grapple at close quarters with recalcitrant matter.  They do so fearlessly while lawyers watch, ready to pounce.    They don't just talk, write, and argue.  Not that the latter aren't important; they are.  But balance is also important.

    We need more doctors, engineers, and businessmen in government — and fewer lawyers.  And a few working stiffs, too.  There are truck drivers and pipe fitters who could do the job.  How can a government top-heavy with lawyers be representative of the folks?

    Lawyers are especially over-represented in the Democrat Party as Michael Medved observes:

    By re-nominating Obama and Biden, the Democrats have selected only attorneys for all six of the most recent places on national tickets, cementing their status as the party of lawyers. Meanwhile, none of the last 8 Republicans nominated for president or vice president has been a practicing attorney.

    Though Romney won a law degree in a joint program along with his Harvard MBA, he never joined the legal profession. All told, 14 of the last 18 places on Democratic national tickets since 1980 have gone to attorneys, and if Al Gore had finished law school at Vanderbilt before running for Congress, that would have been 17 of 18. The domination of the party by lawyers clearly connects to its propensity to address every problem with legal solutions—legislation, regulations, and law suits—rather than private sector, business initiatives.

    None of the above is lawyer bashing.  We need lawyers if we are to have a legal system and the rule of law.  (And to defend ourselves against lawyers.) But lawyers, like liberals, have given themselves a bad name by their bad behavior.  They are too often the sophists of the modern world.  Remember the sophists of the ancient world? They knew how to make the weaker argument appear the stronger.

    Martin Luther once vented his misology via "Reason is a whore."  But nowadays, when whores are sex workers, the Lutheran pronunciamento has lost its sting much as the oldest profession has lost its opprobrium. 

    Perhaps in its stead we should put: "Reason is a lawyer."

    Bill Vallicella

  • The White Supremacy Phantom

    An excellent column by Roger Kimball.

    Bill Vallicella

Latest Comments

  2. 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

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

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

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