Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

  • Moderate?

    WASHINGTON (AP) — Liz Cheney, one of Donald Trump’s fiercest Republican antagonists, will join Democrat Kamala Harris at a campaign event in Wisconsin on Thursday aimed at reaching out to moderate voters and rattling the former president. (emphasis added)

    The implication, of course, is that Trump's policies are extreme.  What we have here, once again, is political projection: unwilling to admit their own extremism, the extremist Dems project it into their political opponents. And Turncoat Liz goes right along with it. She is one of the more repulsive of the RINOs.  

    The Dems embrace a number of extreme, and extremely deleterious, policies. I challenge anyone to point to one of Trump's policies that is extreme.  Policies, not personality. He is not Mr. Nice Guy, like Mike Johnson, Speaker of the House. But how effective is a guy like that in the clinch?

    UPDATE (10/5):  A Dem sees the light.

    Bill Vallicella

    3 responses to “Moderate?”

  • Three American Sophomores

    The Restlessness of Thomas Merton, J. D. Salinger, and Jack Kerouac.

    On balance, a very good essay, but just wrong in places. For example:

    Due to our separation from God that occurred in the Garden, all men intuitively sense that they are missing something, that they are radically incomplete.3 Aristotle had this incompleteness in mind when he opened Metaphysics with the statement, “All men by nature desire to know.” 

    Vito Caiati, cradle Catholic, native New Yorker, former resident of Greenwich Village, ex-pat in France for a time, historian, NYU Ph.D., with a finely-honed literary sensibility, is well qualified to offer some astute commentary on this essay.  I invite him to do so. 

    Caiati introduced me to the novels of Richard Yates.

    Yates Richard

    Why did Kerouac's writing give rise to an outpouring of biographies, commentaries, dissertations, articles, not to mention new editions and the publication of the shoddiest of his literary efforts, when Yates' novels and short stories had no similar effect?  One thought is this. Kerouac was a sort of unwitting pied piper. His 1957 On the Road gave rise to the 'rucksack revolution' of the 'sixties.  Yates' 1961 Revolutionary Road, his best novel, was backward-looking, in large part social criticism of the  Zeitgeist of the fading 'fifties.  

    But my one thought is one-sided and wants augmentation and qualification. Later perhaps.

    While I admire Yates' superb craftsmanship, his writing does not move me. Kerouac moves me, literary slop, hyper-romantic gush, and all.  No one would accuse Kerouac of being a craftsman. 

    Literary sensibility is an ineluctably subjective thing,  but not so subjective as to disallow higher and lower grades of sensibility. But how describe and order them? 

    Two weblogs I regularly consult are Patrick Kurp's Anecdotal Evidence, and the late D. G. Myers' A Commonplace Blog. Myers died ten years ago. Kurp here recounts a meeting with him.

    Bill Vallicella

    2 responses to “Three American Sophomores”

  • The Paradox of Solitude

    Jack Kerouac and Thomas Merton

    Bill Vallicella

  • Kamala and Moria/Witzelsucht

    Joe Biden, suffering from dementia, was finally and 'democratically' kicked to the curb only to be replaced with Kamala Harris who may be suffering from her own neuropsychiatric malady, moria. How else explain her giddiness,  uncontrolled childish euphoria, inappropriate laughter, inability to be serious about matters of grave importance, hyper-joyous inanity, and the like? This very short video (1:33) displays her astonishing unseriousness about a very serious matter.

    It is not for me to decide whether there is anything pathological here, let alone suggest a treatment protocol, but this article may shed light on this strangest of all presidential candidates in the history of the Republic.

    Having pointed to a possible psychiatric cause of the 60-year-old's laughing-gas vacuity, let me now suggest a sociological cause: we live in an Age of Feeling. Like a superannuated AOC — the overgrown adolescent narcissist of the occasional cortex — Kameradin Kamalita can feel, but not think. 

    "It's an unfortunate reality that millions of Americans lack convictions founded in logic, reason, and history, instead relying on feelings as their primary touchstone."  That nails it.

    Bill Vallicella

    5 responses to “Kamala and Moria/Witzelsucht”

  • A Problem for Hylomorphic Dualism in the Philosophy of Mind

    Edward Feser's Immortal Souls: A Treatise on Human Nature may well be the best compendium of Thomist philosophical anthropology presently available.  I strongly recommend it. I wish I could accept its central claims. This entry discusses one of several problems I have.

    The problem I want to discuss in this installment is whether  an Aristotelian-Thomistic (A-T) hylomorphic analysis of human beings can make sense of our post-mortem existence as distinct persons. Thomas Aquinas maintains that after death the souls of rational animals, but not the souls of non-rational animals, continue to exist as disembodied forms, numerically distinct among themselves. What the following argument seems to show is that the survival of distinct souls is impossible on hylomorphic dualism.  I will not be questioning whether in fact we survive our bodily deaths. In question is whether A-T style hylomorphism renders it intelligible.

    1) A primary substance (a substance hereafter) is a concrete individual.  A man, a horse, a tree, a statue are stock examples of substances.  A substance in this technical sense is not to be confused with stuff or material. Substances are individuals in that they have properties but are not themselves properties.  Properties are predicable; substances are not. Substances are concrete in that they are causally active/passive. 

    2) Material substances are analyzable into matter (ὕλη, hyle/hule) and form (μορφή, morphe). A-T ontological analysis is thus hylomorphic analysis.  

    3) The soul of an animal, whether rational or non-rational, is not a complete substance in its own right, but the (substantial) form of its body. Anima forma corporis. Hylomorphic dualism is not a Cartesian dualism of complete substances, but a dualism of ontological constituents of one and the same complete substance.  

    4) Substances of the same kind have the same substantial form, where the substantial form of a substance is the conjunction of the essential (as opposed to accidental) properties that make the substance the kind of substance it is. Unlike Platonic Forms, Aristotelian forms cannot exist except as instantiated in matter.

    5) There are many numerically different human beings (human substances).  I assume that the reader is familiar with the distinction between numerical and qualitative identity and difference. (Comments are enabled  if you have questions.) 

    6) Since these substances of the human kind have the same form, it is not their form that makes them numerically different. (4, 5) What then grounds their numerical difference?

    7) It is the matter of their respective bodies that makes numerically different human beings numerically different. (2,6) Matter, then, is the principium individuationis, the principle of individuation, the ontological ground of the numerical difference of material substances, including human beings.  It is matter that makes Socrates and Plato numerically different substances, not the substantial form they share.

    8) A human being is a person.

    9) A person is an individual substance of a rational nature. (Thomas, following Boethius)

    10) There are many numerically different persons. (5, 8)

    11) Only embodied, 'enmattered,' persons are numerically different from one another: embodiment is thus a necessary condition of difference of persons. (7) It is matter that makes a person the particular person that he is. The matter in question is not materia prima, but what Thomas refers to as materia signata (designated matter, signate matter) in his De Ente et Essentia. As Feser puts it in his Scholastic Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction (2014, p. 199):  "The matter that is the principle of individuation is, in Aquinas's view, matter as made distinct by quantity or dimension — designated matter . . . .

    12) At death a person suffers the loss of embodiment, which implies that after death, a person survives, if at all, as a disembodied form (until the general resurrection, at which time the disembodied soul/form acquires a resurrection body).

    Therefore

    13) After death a human person ceases to exist as the particular person that it is. But that is to say that the particular person, Socrates say, ceases to exist, full stop.  What survives is at best a form which is common to all persons. That form, however, cannot be me or you.  Thus the particularity, individuality, haecceity, ipseity of persons, which is essential to persons, is lost. (11, 12)

     

    Bill Vallicella

    15 responses to “A Problem for Hylomorphic Dualism in the Philosophy of Mind”

  • Drive, He Wrote

    What the Beats were About. Lewis Menand, The New Yorker.

    Bill Vallicella

  • John Kerry on the First Amendment and ‘Disinformation’

    Unbelievable. And you say we are not in a war?

    More proof that the Republic is hanging by a thread: Megyn Kelly on Kamala Harris.

    UPDATE 9/30

    It's war for sure. Sasha Stone. Elon Musk. Victor Davis Hanson. Matt Taibi.

    Which side are you on?

    Bill Vallicella

    One response to “John Kerry on the First Amendment and ‘Disinformation’”

  • Saturday Night at the Oldies: Late September and Fare Thee Wells

    Rod Stewart, Maggie May. "Wake up Maggie, I think I got something to say to you/It's late September and I really should be back at school."

    Carole King, It Might as Well Rain Until September

    The 'sixties forever! We were young, raw, open, impressionable, experience-hungry; we lived intensely and sometimes foolishly.  We felt deeply, and suffered deeply. Youth has its truth. And our popular music put to shame much of the stuff that came before and after. Or so we thought. Would I want to live though the 'sixties again? Hell no, I am having too good a time enjoying it memorially at a safe distance.  Youth has its truth, but if you can make it into old age with health and intellect intact, and a modicum of the lean green, you are winning the game. 

    Django Reinhardt, September Song

    Walter Huston, September Song 

    Marcus Mumford and Oscar Isaac, Fare Thee Well

    Mumford and the boys cover Dylan's "Farewell."  Fabulous. Let it play on.

    The Miracles, What's So Good about Good-Bye?

    Woody Guthrie, So Long it's been Good to Know You

    Peter, Paul, and Mary, Leaving on a Jet Plane

    Bill Vallicella

    3 responses to “Saturday Night at the Oldies: Late September and Fare Thee Wells”

  • Kimball on Kolakowski on Marxism as a Bogus Form of Religion

    I have argued time and again that Marxism is not a religion. But many have a burning need so to misunderstand it. What the great Kolakowski says below reinforces me in the correctness of my opinion.  As for Fredric Jameson, whom Roger Kimball discusses in his Guilt of the Intellectuals, I haven't read him and never will. Theodor Adorno, on the other hand, I have read with care.  I rate him higher than Roger Kimball does, who is more of a public intellectual (a very good one!) than a philosopher. (PhilPapers lists only seven works of his.) I consider Adorno worth reading and evaluating, as I do in Contra Adorno: A Preliminary Plea for Omphaloscopy.

    Kimball:

    Whatever Professor Jameson’s personal commitment to Marxist doctrine, there can be little doubt that his habits of thought were deeply tinged by the gnostic contempt for everyday experience and faith in a secular apocalypse that has characterized Marxism from the beginning. As the philosopher Leszek Kolakowski noted in the third volume of his magisterial study Main Currents of Marxism, this is the ultimate source of Marxism’s Utopian dreams and its great seductiveness for suitably disposed intellectuals. “The influence that Marxism has achieved,” Kolakowski wrote,

    far from being the result or proof of its scientific character, is almost entirely due to its prophetic, fantastic, and irrational elements. Marxism is a doctrine of blind confidence that a paradise of universal satisfaction is awaiting us just around the corner. Almost all the prophecies of Marx and his followers have already proved to be false, but this does not disturb the spiritual certainty of the faithful, any more than it did in the case of chiliastic sects. … In this sense Marxism performs the function of a religion, and its efficacy is of a religious character. But it is a caricature and a bogus form of religion, since it presents its temporal eschatology as a scientific system, which religious mythologies do not purport to be.

    That the Marxist apocalypse is declared to be the inevitable result of inscrutable “scientific” laws only means that its partisans are potentially as dangerous as they are mystifying: the revolutionary is one whose possession of “the truth” is impervious to experience. For him, “History” speaks with a voice beyond contradiction or appeal.

    By the way, 'magisterial' is exactly the word to describe Kolakowski's Main Currents of Marxism. It is the work of a master, a magister. But would it have killed Kimball to provide a page reference? If he had, the editors would probably have deleted it.  Why do you think that is?

    Bill Vallicella

  • Just over the Transom from Malcolm Pollack

    Hi Bill,
     
    My neighbor didn't call me a Trumper to my face, but mentioned (back in April) to my wife that he had the impression that I was one. (I felt obliged to unpack the assertion in a post.)
     
    The Cape has a lot of Dems, but most of the working people out here are what Zman calls "dirt people" (i.e., those who encounter actually existing reality in their work), and they are . . . well, Trumpers. They are also well-armed.
     
    [. . .]
     
    The post to which Malcolm links, from April,  is up to his usual high standard and is one you ought to read.  I agree with it in its entirety. As the political temperature rises, its relevance does as well. 
    Bill Vallicella

    3 responses to “Just over the Transom from Malcolm Pollack”

  • Religion and Anthropomorphism . . .

    . . . with an oblique reference to Mormonism.

    Substack latest.

    Bill Vallicella

    11 responses to “Religion and Anthropomorphism . . .”

  • Edward Feser, Immortal Souls: A Treatise on Human Nature

    I want to thank Ed Feser for sending me a copy of his latest contribution to Thomistic Studies.  

    Immortal Souls provides as ambitious and complete a defense of Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophical anthropology as is currently in print. Among the many topics covered are the reality and unity of the self, the immateriality of the intellect, the freedom of the will, the immortality of the soul, the critique of artificial intelligence, and the refutation of both Cartesian and materialist conceptions of human nature. Along the way, the main rival positions in contemporary philosophy and science are thoroughly engaged with and rebutted.

    Like all of Feser's books, Immortal Souls is a model of expository clarity and analytic precision informed by an extensive knowledge of the contemporary literature.  You may order a copy of this (physically and intellectually) weighty tome from Amazon for a mere 31 USD.  

    A non-technical effort of mine saw the light in August, Life's Path: Some Trail Notes. 

    In this collection of aphorisms, observations, maxims, and mini-essays, a professional philosopher quits the ivory tower and hits the road of life. Here are some of his trail notes. They offer guidance and insight in a non-dogmatic spirit while encouraging in the reader the development of a critical attitude. While philosophical, these writings focus on the existential and practical aspects of philosophy rather than on the technical or theoretical. This is not academic discourse but life-philosophy with an edge that cuts against the grain of our contemporary decadence.

    Topics include happiness and ambition, youth and old age, body and soul, love and lust, money and its uses, manners and morals, and the last things.

    The price is right: $2.99 for Kindle, $20 for paperback, $28 for hardbound.  I have mailed six free copies to friends and I have four more free copies to distribute locally to Kid Nemesis, Biker Mike, Medico, and The Great Navigator when our paths next cross.  So if you are one of these characters, don't buy it. There's a copy with your name on it.

    Bill Vallicella

    7 responses to “Edward Feser, Immortal Souls: A Treatise on Human Nature”

  • Political Enemies and Political Tactics

    I had an interesting exchange with Dr. Caiati about political tactics in the comment thread to Haitians, Cats, and Red Herrings. Here are some further thoughts.

    When our political enemies use our virtues against us, we should use their vices against them. Call it the Converse Alinskyite Tactic (CAT).

    I used to say to them: Lie about us, and we will tell the truth about you. Now I say: Lie about us and we'll lie about you.  Along the same lines, and given that Kamalism Will Destroy America, as it surely will, Tom Klingenstein writes:

    In wartime, as Churchill famously observed, “truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.” We are told, by Republicans almost as frequently as by Democrats, that Trump lost the recent debate. But even if this were true, to say so merely gives aid and comfort to the enemy. Like Trump, we must stand up and proclaim victory. Assert it: He won. These are wartime rules. The other side already plays by such rules. We do not. 

    Likewise, we fight Kamalism with facts and arguments, but today these are no more effective than using a straw to penetrate the shell of tortoise, as Lincoln  put it. For example, our best historians, liberals and conservatives, thoroughly debunked the 1619 project, the official history of Kamalism. But to what avail? War is not a battle of facts. 

    The point here is that we conservatives will always lose so long as we fail to grasp that our political opponents are enemies who see politics as warfare.  If that is the way they see it, and it is, then that is the way we must see it.  Taking the high ground does no good. You might think that taking the high ground would shame our enemies and inspire them to play fair and speak the truth. But this ignores the fact that our opponents are enemies who are out to win by any means. They cannot be shamed.  

    See my Politics as Polemics: The Converse Clausewitz Principle. I quote David Horowitz, a former leftist, who understands how these people operate.

    I also refer you to recent posts by Malcolm Pollack who draws upon Carl Schmitt.

    It is time to gird our loins and enter the fray. The fate of the Republic hangs in the balance.

    See also: Rod Dreher: Floating Above the Fray as Usual. In the last couple of years, however, Dreher has 'evolved' somewhat.

    Bill Vallicella

  • Books or Eternal Life?

    A quick Substack poke at Camus.

    Bill Vallicella

  • Central Bank Digital Currency

    It is already upon us. Fifty Shades of Central Bank Tyranny.

    In this article, I will define what a Central Bank Digital Currency is by exploring its major categories. I’ll demonstrate that the US already operates with a form of CBDC, albeit without the flashy labels. I will also show that the Federal Reserve (the Fed) can introduce more dystopian elements into this system—such as programming restrictions on when, how, and where you can spend your money without requiring Congressional approval.

    However, the fear of central bank control over your transactions is, in fact, a red herring. The real threat lies with our government, which has already perfected the art of surveillance. Adding programmability is just the next logical step. Ultimately, both Republicans and Democrats are steering us toward the same destination: total digital control. They may use different words and different propaganda, but their goals converge. While we can’t simply vote out of this predicament, we can opt out entirely.

    Bill Vallicella

    One response to “Central Bank Digital Currency”

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