If a proposition is true, does it follow that it is rational to accept it? (Of course, if a proposition is known to be true, then it is eminently rational to accept it; but that's not the question.)
Hefner's death reminds me of a true story from around 1981. This was before I was married. Emptying my trash into a dumpster behind my apartment building one day, I 'spied a big stack of Playboy magazines at the bottom of the container. Of course, I rescued them as any right-thinking man would: they have re-sale value and they contain excellent articles, stories, and interviews.
I stacked the mags on an end table. When my quondam girl friend dropped by, the magazines elicited a raised eyebrow.
I quickly explained that I had found them in the dumpster and that they contain excellent articles, arguments for logical analysis, etc. She of course did not believe that I had found them.
What I told her was true, but not credible. She was fully within her epistemic rights in believing that I was lying to save face. In fact, had she believed the truth that I told her, I would have been justified in thinking her gullible and naive.
This shows that truth and rational acceptability are not the same property. A proposition can be true but not rationally acceptable. It is also easily shown that a proposition can be rationally acceptable but not true. Truth is absolute; rational acceptability is relative to various indices.
"But what about rational acceptablity at the Peircean ideal limit of inquiry?"
Well, that's a horse of a different color. Should I mount it, I would trangress the bounds of this entry.
As for Hugh Hefner, may the Lord have mercy on him. And on the rest of us too.
By mainstreaming pornography in Playboy magazine, and valorizing the pursuit of (male, heterosexual) hedonistic pleasure with his highly publicized playboy lifestyle, Hefner made a singularly important contribution to the overthrow of received norms of sexual morals that made modern (post-1960s) feminism possible. But he also accomplished this overthrow by exploiting women, reducing them to sex objects for use (and sometimes abuse) in the satisfaction of the insatiable (and now unconstrained) male libido.
If Linker's claim is that no sort of post-1960s feminism could have arisen without Hef's mainstreaming of pornography, valorization of male hedonism, and overthrow of received sexual norms, then I doubt it. A sort of equity feminism could have arisen without the Hefnerian excesses and without women aping the basest elements in men. I'd be interested in hearing what Christina Hoff Sommers would have to say about this.
That Playboy was a necessary condition of the possibilility of Playgirl is a more credible claim than that the Playboy lifestyle was a necessary condition of the possibility of the rise of any sort of worthwhile post-1960s feminism.
Leftist whining about 'cultural appropriation' and Alt-Right denial of the universality of certain cultural goods may be mirror images of each other. The shared assumption is that cultural goods are not universal but can be owned.
The theorem of Pythagoras has his name on it but neither he nor his descendants own it.
The same goes for the life-enhancing bourgeois values lately preached by Amy Wax.
Some important points re: the NFL flag and anthem controversy.
1) In its third clause, the First Amendment to the U. S. Constitution states, "Congress shall make no law . . . abridging freedom of speech or of the press." This protects the U. S. citizen from any attempt from the side of the U. S. government to squelch free expression. It does not protect a citizen who is in the employ of a private concern from attempts by the employer to limit speech or expression. The kneeling football players while on the field of play have no First Amendment free speech rights. Their employers may fire them just as Google was within its legal rights when it fired James Damore.
The difference is that Google was morally wrong for firing an engineer who spoke the politically incorrect truth, while the club owners are morally wrong if they do not fire the overpaid, disrespectful football players.
2) What the kneelers appear to be protesting is imaginary. Jason Riley:
The players have said they are protesting the unjust treatment of blacks by law enforcement and cite the spate of police shootings that have come to light in recent years. Team owners and NFL officials will have to decide whether to continue indulging such behavior on company time, but the larger question is whether what is being protested has some basis in reality beyond anecdotes and viral videos on social media.
Hard data, however, shows that the protests are hollow. Heather Mac Donald:
The FBI released its official crime tally for 2016 today [25 September 2017], and the data flies in the face of the rhetoric that professional athletes rehearsed in revived Black Lives Matter protests over the weekend. Nearly 900 additional blacks were killed in 2016 compared with 2015, bringing the black homicide-victim total to 7,881. Those 7,881 “black bodies,” in the parlance of Ta-Nehisi Coates, are 1,305 more than the number of white victims (which in this case includes most Hispanics) for the same period, though blacks are only 13 percent of the nation’s population. The increase in black homicide deaths last year comes on top of a previous 900-victim increase between 2014 and 2015.
3) Whether or not the kneelers have anything real to protest, they of course have a right to their opinion. They ought to express it in the proper venue. They also have a moral obligation to get the facts straight and form correct opinions, an obligation they are not fulfilling.
4) Just as the kneelers have a right to their opinion, as foolish and destructive as it is, President Trump has a right to his sane and reasonable one: "Fire the sons of bitches!" My thought exactly. His expression is harsh but justified. There is such a thing as righteous anger.
5) The vicious and destructive Left promotes the lie that Trump's call for a firing of the louts is 'racist.' Not at all. If you believe that lie, you are not only stupid, but vile and deserve moral condemnation.
The kneelers are both white and black, and even if they were all black, race doesn't come into it. The kneelers are being condemned for their lack of civility, their disrespect for the USA, it values, its flag, its anthem, its war heroes, and for injecting politics into what ought to be an apolitical event.
There was a jackass on Tucker Carlson's show the other night who absurdly claimed that 'Fire the sons of bitches" is code for 'Fire the niggers." That is beneath refutation, but it does indicate what scum leftists are.
6) There is also the issue of federal, state, and local subsidies of football franchises using tax dollars. And it is not just the misuse of public funds to build stadiums. The NFL gets billions in subsidies from U. S. taxpayers. That ought to anger you even if you are a football fan. Football is of interest only to some people, does not serve the common good, lowers the general level of a culture, and its subsidy to the benefit of some is not part of the legitimate functions of government.
7) The NFL and the scumbags of the Left don't care what you think and will ignore what you have to say, no matter how reasonable. The only effective way to punish this collection of bastards is by defunding them. Boycott the games and don't buy the merchandise. If you really must watch the game of football, watch the college variety.
John Stuart Mill was another philosopher who believed something similar. In 1859 he published his Thoughts on Parliamentary Reform, in which he proposed a voting system heavily weighted towards the better educated. “If every ordinary unskilled labourer had one vote … a member of any profession requiring a long, accurate and systematic mental cultivation – a lawyer, a physician or surgeon, a clergyman of any denomination, a literary man, an artist, a public functionary … ought to have six,” he wrote. When stated this baldly, it is surely obvious that the desire to maintain so-called political expertise is actually a thinly disguised attempt to entrench the interests of an educated middle class.
"Surely obvious?" It is not obvious at all. Why should my informed, thoughtful, independent vote be cancelled out by the vote of some know-nothing tribalist who votes according to the dictate of his tribal leader? Not that I quite agree with Grayling.
Fraser and Grayling appear to represent extremes both of which ought to be avoided. I get the impression that there is a certain animosity between the two men.
For now, just this: If you have devoted your whole soul to the enjoyment and promotion of the pleasures of the flesh, then you had better hope that the soul dissolves with the dissolution of the body. Contemporaries will think that of course it does, but it is not quite obvious, is it?
Hef thought of himself as a liberator and good person. But then I think of all the abortions, all the betrayals, all the marriages and families destroyed by the sexual revolution to which Hef was a major contributor.
As much of a flaky liberal as Thomas Merton (1915 – 1968) is, both politically and theologically, I love the guy I meet in the pages of the seven volumes of The Journals of Thomas Merton. I am presently savoring Volume Six, 1966-1967. This morning I came upon the entry of May 21, 1967, Trinity Sunday, in which he reports being "dazzled and baffled" by a new book on quantum physics by George Gamow.
The 52-year-old gushes excitedly over the accomplishments of "Niels Bohr and Co." and "this magnificent instrument of thought they developed to understand what is happening in matter, what energy really is about — with their confirmation of the kind of thing Herakleitos was reaching for by intuition." (237) Now comes the passage the vitriol of which caught my attention:
What a crime it was — that utterly stupid course on "cosmology" that I had to take here [at the Trappist monastery of Gethsemani in the 1940s] (along with the other so-called philosophy in Hickey's texts!). Really criminal absurdity! And at the time when the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima! Surely there were people in the order who knew better than [to] allow such a thing! Dom Frederic, no. He couldn't help it. The whole Church still demanded this, and God knows, maybe some congregation still does. (237-238)
Now I have read my fair share of scholastic manuals, including Klubertanz, Vaske, van Steenberghen, Garrigou-Lagrange, Smith & Kendzierski, and a some others, but I was unfamiliar with this Hickey. Curious to see how bad his manuals could have been, I did some poking around but came up with very little. But I did glean some information from Benjamin Clark, O.C.S.O., Thomas Merton's Gethsemani:
We used as text the three-volume series by J.S. Hickey, abbot of Mount Melleray in Ireland 1932-1934, a text quite widely used in seminaries in the United States at the time. The text was in Latin, but English was spoken in class, unlike some seminaries in the United States at the time where the philosophy lectures were still given in Latin. Most of our students did not have enough Latin background for that, and some found even reading the text rough going at times.
Does anybody have volumes from the Hickey series? Is he willing to part with them? What about scholastic cosmology as presented by Hickey got Merton so worked up?
My desultory research also led me to a quotation from a guy I know quite well:
At any rate, a recent blog post by Bill Vallicella got me thinking about it again. The post is ostensibly about the origins of political correctness. In reflecting on that, Vallicella also had this to say:
By the time I began as a freshman at Loyola University of Los Angeles in 1968, the old Thomism that had been taught out of scholastic manuals was long gone to be replaced by a hodge-podge of existentialism, phenomenology, and critical theory. The only analytic fellow in the department at the time was an adjunct with an M. A. from Glasgow. I pay tribute to him in In Praise of a Lowly Adjunct. The scholasticism taught by sleepy Jesuits before the ferment of the ‘60s was in many ways moribund, but at least it was systematic and presented a coherent worldview. The manuals, besides being systematic, also introduced the greats: Plato, Aristotle, Thomas, et al. By contrast, we were assigned stuff like Marcuse's Eros and Civilization. The abdication of authority on the part of Catholic universities has been going on for a long time.
So, how bad was scholastic manualism?
Edward Feser counts as a latter day manualist. See his Scholastic Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction (Editiones Scholasticae, 2014). Here is an article by Ed in which he lays into David Bentley Hart to repel the latter's charge of scholastic manualism. Excerpt:
Menacing references to the threat of “manualism” and “baroque neoscholasticism” have long been a favored tactic in theologically liberal Catholic circles. Given Aquinas’s enormous prestige and influence within the Catholic Church, attacking some position he took has always been a tricky business. The solution was to invent a bogeyman variously called “manualism,” “sawdust Thomism,” etc. This allows the critic to identify the hated position with that and proceed as if it has nothing to do with Thomas himself. Such epithets generate something like a Pavlovian response in many readers, subverting rational thought and poisoning the reader’s mind against anything a Thomist opponent might have to say. Though neither a theological liberal nor a Catholic, Hart knows what buttons to push in order to win over the less-discriminating members of his audience.
Leftists hold that borders and walls are 'racist' and 'hateful' and 'fascist' and that the nation state is an illegitimate construct. They bristle at talk of national identity and national sovereignty. Is it not then paradoxical for these same leftists to embrace identity politics at the sub-national level?
And if walls are 'racist' and 'hateful' then so is Obama's Wall:
You think that if God exists, He exists necessarily, and if He does not exist, He does not exist necessarily. But suppose that God does not exist. We agree, I think, that we can't rationally rule out the possibility? For instance, you've often argued that our evidence doesn't settle the question of theism versus atheism. But then, supposing that God doesn't exist, and supposing that He might not exist in the actual world (for all we know), isn't it evident that regardless there are lots of truths? For instance, even if God does not exist, it would still be true that He does not exist, or that He does not exist necessarily. I'm not sure that you'd agree with this, but if you would, shouldn't you also agree that if God does not exist, there are some truths?
That is not quite what I said. I accept what I call Anselm's Insight: if God exists, then he exists necessarily; if he does not exist, then necessarily he does not exist. What does not exist necessarily might be contingent; what necessarily does not exist is impossible. I know you understand the idea; it is just that your formulation suffers from scope ambiguity. Anselm's Insight, then, is that God is either necessary or impossible. He is necessarily non-contingent. (The non-contingent embraces both the necessary and the impossible.) In the patois of possible worlds, either he exists in every, or in no, world. If you wonder why I don't capitalize 'he,' it is because I hold that while piety belongs in religion, it does not belong in philosophy of religion.
Agreed, we cannot rationally rule out the possibility of God's nonexistence. I would say we cannot rationally rule it out or rule it in. "But then, supposing that God doesn't exist, and supposing that He might not exist in the actual world (for all we know), isn't it evident that regardless there are lots of truths? "
I would rewrite your sentence as follows:
It is epistemically possible that God not exist. Nevertheless, it is evident that there are truths.
I agree with the rewrite. It is evident that there are truths, but for all we can claim to know, God does not exist. But this leaves open how God and truth are related. Here are five different views:
1) There is truth, but there is no God.
2) There is truth, and there is God, but God is not the ontological ground of truth.
3) There is truth, there is God, and truth ultimately depends on the existence of God. There is truth because there is God.
4) There is no truth, because there is no God.
5) There is God, but no truth.
Ad (1). This I would guess is the view of many. There are truths, and among these truths is the truth that God does not exist. This, I take it, would be the standard atheist view.
Ad (2). This, I take it, would be the standard theist view among analytic philosophers. Consider a philosopher who holds that God is a necessary being and also holds that it is necessarily the case that there are some truths, but would deny the truth of the subjunctive conditional, If, per impossibile, God were not to exist, then truths would not exist either.
Ad (3). This is the view that I am inclined to accept. Thus I would affirm the subjunctive conditional lately mentioned. The difference between (2) and (3) is subtle. On both sides it is held that both God and truths are necessary, but the Augustinian — to give him a name — holds that God is the ultimate 'source' of all truth and thus all intelligibility, or, if you prefer, the ultimate 'ground' of all truth and intelligibility.
Ad (4). This is Nietzsche's view.
Ad (5). I have the impression that certain post-Nietzschean POMO-heads hold this. It is view not worth discussing.
I should think only the first three views have any merit.
Each of the three has difficulties and none of the three can be proven.
I will mention quickly a problem for the admittedly plausible first view.
Among the truths there are necessary truths such as the laws of logic. Now a truth is a true truth-bearer, a true proposition, say. Nothing can have a property unless it exists. (Call this principle Anti-Meinong). So no proposition can have the property of being true unless the proposition exists. A necessary truth is true in every metaphysically possible world. It follows that a necessarily true proposition exists in every possible world including worlds in which there are no finite minds. But a proposition is a thought-accusative that cannot exists except for a mind. If there is no God, every mind is contingent. A contradiction ensues: there is a world W such that, in W, there exists a thought-accusative that is not the thought-accusative of any mind.
Here are some ways an atheist might 'solve' the problem:
a) Deny that there are necessary truths.
b) Deny that truth is any sense a property of propositions.
c) Deny Anti-Meinong.
d) Deny that propositions are thought-accusatives; accept some sort of Platonism about propositions.
But each of these denials involves problems of its own which I would have no trouble unpacking.
"Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?" my father used to say. It drove me crazy when he said that. Now, it's dawned on me that he was right.
Interesting. Take it with several grains of salt and factor in the fact that it is by a 'transwoman.' The following is borne out by my experience:
But ultimately I don't need academic philosophy to do philosophy. My blogging over the past ten years has reached a larger audience than I could ever hope to achieve through the academic journal system.
On a really good day I'll get 3,000 page views. Usually I bump along at about half of that or less. But I reach people and influence them. Proof is the thick manila folder of fan mail I have received.
What in the world happened to the liberal arts? A degree in the humanities used to transmit the knowledge and wisdom imbued in the works of great Western artists, writers, musicians and thinkers like Shakespeare and Mozart. But today, that same degree stresses Western racism, sexism, imperialism, and other ills and sins that reinforce a sense of victimhood and narcissism. So, what happened? Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute explains in a five and one half minute video.
