Maverick Philosopher – Page 364 – Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

A Funny World

It's a funny world in which Donald J. Trump does more to save Christians and Christianity than the current Pope. I suppose you could say that the Lord works in mysterious ways.

Ten Impediments to Religious Belief

Why is religious belief so hard to accept? Why is it so much harder to accept today than in past centuries?

Herewith, some notes toward a list of the impedimenta, the stumbling blocks, that litter the path of the would-be believer of the present day. Whether the following ought to be impediments is a further question, a normative question. The following taxonomy is merely descriptive. And probably incomplete. This is a blog. This is only a blog.

1. There is first of all the obtrusiveness and constancy and coherence of the deliverances of the senses, outer and inner. The "unseen order" (William James), if such there be, is no match for the 'seen order.' The massive assault upon the sense organs has never been greater than at the present time given the high technology of distraction: radio, television, portable telephony, e-mail, Facebook and other social media, not to mention Twitter, perhaps the ultimate weapon of mass distraction.

Here is some advice on how to avoid God from C. S. Lewis, "The Seeing Eye" in Christian Reflections (Eeerdmans, 1967), pp. 168-167:

Avoid silence, avoid solitude, avoid any train of thought that leads off the beaten track. Concentrate on money, sex, status, health and (above all) on your own grievances. Keep the radio on. Live in a crowd. Use plenty of sedation. If you must read books, select them very carefully. But you'd be safer to stick to the papers. You'll find the advertisements helpful; especially those with a sexy or a snobbish appeal.

If Lewis could only see us now.

2. The fact that there are many competing systems of religious belief and practice. They overlap, but they also contradict. The extant contradictory systems cannot all be true, though they could all be false. The fact that one's own system is contradicted by others doesn't make it false, but it does raise reasonable doubts as to whether it is true. For a thinking person, this is a stumbling block to the naive and unthinking acceptance of the religion in which one has been brought up.

3. The specificity of religious belief systems and their excessively detailed dogmatic contents. One is put off by the presumptuousness of those who claim to know what they cannot, or are not likely, to know. For example, overconfident assurances as to the natures of heaven, hell, and purgatory together with asseverations as to who went where. Stalin in hell? How do you know? How do you even know that there is a place of everlasting punishment as opposed to such other options as simple annihilation of unrepentant miscreants?

There is the presumptuousness of those who fancy that they understand the economics of salvation to such a degree that they can confidently assert that so many Hail Mary's will remove so many years in purgatory. For many, such presumptuousness is an abomination, though not as bad as the sale of indulgences.

The human mind, driven by doxastic security needs, is naturally dogmatic and naturally tends to make certainties of uncertainties. (It also does the opposite when in skeptical mode: it makes uncertainties of (practical) certainties.)

4. The fact that the religions of the world, over millenia, haven't done much to improve us individually or collectively. Even if one sets aside the intemperate fulminations of the New Atheists, that benighted crew uniquely blind to the good religion has done, there is the fact that religious belief and practice, even if protracted and sincere, do little toward the moral improvement of people. To some this is an impediment to acceptance of a religion.

Related point: the corruption of the churches.

Again, my task here is merely descriptive. I am not claiming that one ought to be dissuaded from religion by its failure to improve people much or to maintain itself in institutional form without corruption. One can always argue that we would have been much, much worse without religion. Even Islam, "The saddest and poorest form of theism," (Schopenhauer) has arguably improved the lot of the denizens of the lands in which it has held sway, civilizing them, and providing moral guidance.

5. The putative conflict between science and religion. Competing magisteria each with a loud claim to be the proper guide to life. Thinking people are bothered by this.

6. The tension between Athens (philosophy) and Jerusalem (religion). The battle between faith and reason. So many of the contents of religion are either absurd (logically contradictory) or else difficult to show to be rationally acceptable.

7. The weight of concupiscence. We are sexual beings naturally, and oversexualized beings socially, and so largely unable to control our drives. The thrust of desire valorizes the phenomenal thus conferring plenary reality upon the objects of the senses while occluding one's spiritual sight into the noumenal. See Simone Weil in the Light of Plato. Is it any surprise that the atheist Russell, even in old age, refused to be faithful to his wife? It is reasonable to conjecture that his lust and his pride — intellectuals tend to be very proud with outsized egos– blinded him to spiritual realities. Jean-Paul Sartre is another case in point.

8. Suggestibility. We are highly sensitive and responsive to social suggestions as to what is real and important and what is not. In a society awash with secular suggestions, people find it hard to take religion seriously.

9. The apparent moral absurdities of some religious doctrines. See Kant on Abraham and Isaac.

10. The rise of life-extending technology. For some of us at least, life is a lot less nasty, brutish, and short than it used to be. This aids and abets the illusion that this material life suffices and will continue indefinitely. The worst illusion sired by advanced technology, however, is the transhumanist fantasy which I discuss here.

Is Civility Still Possible?

James Schall appears to return a negative answer. In the course of so doing he clarifies the concepts of the civil, the uncivil, and uncivilized.

Do You Speak English?

Then you are guilty of 'cultural appropriation' unless you are English.

Addendum 4/12:

A philosophy professor comments:

The claim in your post today, strikes me as clearly false.

Just because someone speaks a language (even as a primary language) doesn't mean they are cultural appropriators guilty of something. Imagine the English colonize your land and people and force English upon you. Then this conditional, which is what I think you are claiming, is false: "If you speak English and you are not English, then you are guilty of 'cultural appropriation'.

The good professor has found a counterexample to my conditional claim. But he misses the point of my pithy little poke. My intention was to ridicule the politically correct silliness of those who see something reprehensible in, say, donning a sombrero when one is not a Mexican. Aphorisms, maxims, and other sayings derive their punch from their pith. You have heard it said, briefly, and with wit, that "Brevity is the soul of wit."

Let us note en passant and in defiance of the content of the witticism that it can be found in William Shakespeare in Hamlet, Act II wherein the Bard has Polonius say:

Therefore, since brevity is the soul of wit

And tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes,

I will be brief: your noble son is mad.

Was this beautiful coinage first put into circulation by Shakespeare? I have no idea. But I digress.

Consider the following piece of folk wisdom,

He who hesitates is lost.

Counterexamples abound. And the same goes for the competing maxim,

Look before you leap.

If one were to rewrite them to make them proof against the punctilios of philosophers and logicians, the result would be something clunky and not particularly memorable. For example,

It is often, but not always, the case that one who hesitates before acting misses his opportunity and in consequence of such hesitancy either loses his life or suffers some lesser, but nonetheless regrettable, loss.

But then one has traded the lawyerly for the literary.

Catholic Enablers of Islam

William Kilpatrick

Anything

People will say anything, which is why one should not let oneself become upset over (almost) anything anyone says.

Do you know the word bushwa? We ought to raise it from its desuetude.

‘Religion of Peace’ Update

Here:

Suspected suicide bombers struck two [Coptic Christian] Egyptian churches on Palm Sunday, killing more than 40 people in the deadliest assault on civilians since President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi’s election nearly three years ago.

Islamic State claimed the attacks on the St. George church in the Nile Delta city of Tanta and St. Mark’s cathedral in Alexandria . . .

Abdication of Authority in Academe

Heather MacDonald recounts her experiences at Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, California and at UCLA:

The Rose Institute for State and Local Government at Claremont McKenna had invited me to meet with students to talk about my book, The War on Cops, on April 6. Several calls went out on Facebook to “shut down” this “notorious white supremacist fascist Heather Mac Donald.”

Time was, when university faculty and administrators stood in loco parentis. Now their posture is supine while the students go loco.

Mental Act Nominalism with an Application to Divine Simplicity

This entry continues a discussion with Dan M. begun here.

Before we get to the main event, a terminological quibble. A view that denies some category of entity I would call eliminativist, not nominalist. I say this because one can be a nominalist about properties without denying their existence. Tom is a tomato of my acquaintance. Tom is red and ripe and juicy and other things besides. It is a Moorean fact, I would say, that Tom has properties, and that, in general, things have properties. After all, Tom is red and ripe, etc. It's a datum, a given, a starting point. A sensible question is not whether there are properties, but what they are. Of course there are properties. What is controversial is whether they are universals or particulars, mind-dependent or mind-independent, immanent or transcendent, constituents or not of the things that have them, etc.

Still, there are those parsimonious souls who deny that there are properties. They accept predicates such as 'red' and 'ripe' but deny that in extralinguistic reality there are properties corresponding to these or to any predicates. These people are called extreme nominalists. It's a lunatic position in my view valuable only as a foil for the development of a saner view. But moderate nominalism is not a lunatic view. This is the view that there are properties all right; it's just that properties are not universals, but particulars, trope theory being one way of cashing out this view. My Trope category goes into more detail on this.

The present point, however, is simply this: a moderate nominalist about properties does not deny the existence of properties. So my suggestion is that if you are out to deny some category K of entity (i.e., deny of a putative category that it has members) then you should label your position as eliminativist about Ks, not nominalist about Ks. Dan is an eliminativist about mental acts, not a nominalist about them.

But this is a merely terminological point. Having made it, I will now irenically acquiesce in Dan's terminology for the space of this post. Dan writes with admirable clarity:

As you explain my proposal (I'll call it "Mental Act Nominalism" or "MAN"), an ontological assay of propositional attitudes will only turn up two entities, the agent and the proposition. The agent's having the relevant attitude (e.g., belief, doubt) to the proposition is not itself construed as an additional entity. You say that this view is committed to "a denial of mental acts and thereby a denial of the act-content distinction."

[. . .]

Turning to your concern. You suggest that "such a parsimonious scheme cannot account for the differences among" various propositional attitudes (belief, doubt, etc.). And after discussing some examples, you say they provide "phenomenological evidence that we cannot eke by with just the subject and the object/content but also need to posit mental acts." And you add: "The differences among [various attitudes] will then be act-differences, differences in the type of mental acts."

The gist of my reply is that we can perhaps account for the differences you speak of without committing ourselves to the existence of the relevant mental acts/states.

Consider these two situations:

(A) Dan wonders whether Bill owns cats.

(B) Dan believes that Bill owns cats.

(We may suppose there was a time lapse between them.) What should the ontological assays of (A) and (B) include? As you described MAN, its ontological assays of propositional attitudes deliver just two entities, the relevant agent and proposition. So on this approach, we get these two assays:

(A Assay 1) Dan, the proposition Bill owns cats.

(B Assay 1) Dan, the proposition Bill owns cats.

These assays fail to differentiate situations A and B. However, it's not clear to me that MAN has to be implemented in this way. Consider these alternative assays:

(A Assay 2) Dan, the relation wondering whether, the proposition Bill owns cats.

(B Assay 2) Dan, the relation believing that, the proposition Bill owns cats.

These assays do differentiate A and B, by virtue of the different relations. I think MAN is prima facie compatible with these assays, since the main aim of MAN is not to deny the existence of propositional attitude relations per se, but to deny the existence of mental acts or states consisting in the agent's having the relevant attitude. So, MAN must reject, for example, these assays:

(A Assay 3) Dan, the proposition Bill owns cats, the state Dan's wondering whether Bill owns cats.

(B Assay 3) Dan, the proposition Bill owns cats, the state Dan's believing that Bill owns cats.

So perhaps we can be realists about propositional attitude relations, but nominalists about propositional attitude states (of affairs). The former would give us a robust basis to differentiate different kinds of propositional attitudes, while the latter would preserve MAN.

BV: The issue is now one of deciding which tripartite assay to accept, mine, or Dan's. Where I have mental acts or states, he has relations. Mental acts are datable particulars, where a particular is an unrepeatable item. Dan's relations are, I take it, universals, where a universal is a repeatable item.

Suppose that Dan, who has not seen his elderly neighbor Sam come out of his house in a week, fears that he is dead. What does the world have to contain for 'Dan fears that Sam is dead' to be true? Suppose that it contains Dan, the relation fears that, and the proposition Sam is dead, but not the mental act, state, or event of Dan's fearing that Sam is dead. Then I will point out that Dan, the relation fears that, and the proposition Sam is dead can all three exist without it being the case that Dan fears that Sam is dead. The collection of these three items does not suffice as truthmaker for the sentence in question.

This is the case even if the relation in question is an immanent universal, that is, one that cannot exist instantiated. It could be that Dan exists, the proposition Sam is dead exists, and the relation fears that exists in virtue of being instantiated by the pair (Pam, the proposition Hillary is sad.) It is possible that all three of these items exist and 'Dan fears that Sam is dead' is false.

We need something to tie together the three items in question. On my tripartite analysis it is the mental act that ties them together. So I am arguing that we cannot get by without positing something like the particular Dan's fearing that Sam is dead.

How can a simple God know contingent truths, such as Bill owns cats? On the version of MAN that accepts bona fide relations, we say: God bears the relation believing that to the proposition Bill owns cats. There are just three entities to which this situation commits us: God, the relation, and the proposition. There is no state (construed as a bona fide entity) of God's believing that Bill owns cats.

BV: But if S bears R to p, this implies that R is instantiated by the ordered pair (S, p), and that this relation-instantiation is a state or state of affairs or event. It is clearly something in addition to its constituents inasmuch as it is their truthmaking togetherness. And this bring us back to our original difficulty of explaining how a simple God can know contingent truths.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: ‘Foolish’ Songs

April Fool's Weekend found me in a fool's paradise, LaLaLand. So I'm seven days late and several dollars short, but here for your auditory amusement are some tunes in celebration or bemoanment of human folly the chief instance of which is romantic love. Who has never been played for a fool by a charming member of the opposite sex?

Old age is the sovereign cure for romantic folly and I sincerely recommend it to the young and foolish. Take care to get there. Philosophers especially should want to live long so as to study life from all temporal angles.

We have it on good authority that the unexamined life is not worth living. To which I add that the examination ought to be of every age from every age.

Elvis Presley, A Fool Such as I
Ricky Nelson, Poor Little Fool. Those "carefree devil eyes" will do it every time.
Brenda Lee, Fool #1
The Shirelles, Foolish Little Girl

Ricky Nelson, Fools Rush In. "Fools rush in/Where wise men never go/But wise men never fall in love/So how are they to know?"
Sam Cooke, Fool's Paradise. Sage advice. Heed it well, my young friends. A version by Mose Allison. I heard Mose live a number of times back in the '70s, most memorably at The Lighthouse in Hermosa Beach, California. Sadly, he died last November. But he made it to 89.
Elvin Bishop, Fooled Around and Fell in Love

The Who, Won't Get Fooled Again
Kingston Trio, Some Fool Made a Soldier of Me
Quicksilver Messenger Service, The Fool

Bill Evans, Foolish Heart
Lesley Gore, She's a Fool
Paul McCartney, The Fool on the Hill
Aretha Franklin, Chain of Fools
Connie Francis, Everybody's Somebody's Fool
Grateful Dead, Ship of Fools
Ketty Lester, I'm a Fool to Want You

"The fool who persists in his folly becomes wise" (William Blake)

Nature, Signs, and Religious Experience

Reader P. J. offers us for delectation and analysis the following quotation from Brother Lawrence, The Practice of the Presence of God:

[Brother Lawrence] was eighteen at the time, and still in the world. He told me that it had all happened one winter day, as he was looking at a barren tree. Although the tree's leaves were indeed gone, he knew that they would soon reappear, followed by blossoms and then fruit. This gave him a profound impression of God's providence and power which never left him. Brother Lawrence still maintains that his impression detached him entirely from the world and gave him such a great love for God that it hasn't changed in all of the forty years he has been walking with Him.

P. J. comments that

. . . nature is sometimes said to serve as a 'signpost' to God's existence, without the need for auxiliary premises such as the complexity of things, the orderly patterns of substances as described by the laws of nature, the intelligibility of the world, and so on and on. It is almost as if — at least for Br. Lawrence — nature, just by being there, served to point toward God in a primitive or non-inferential way. Nature, for him, pointed not simply to God's existence, but to a more positive account of God as the providential orderer of nature.

I admit that I don't know where to take this idea, or how far it can be taken, but it strikes me as an interesting topic to research in natural theology: the way(s) in which nature, without the aid of auxiliary premises, can point to God's existence, and to a more content-rich account of the divine attributes.

I agree that the question is interesting and important. Perhaps we can formulate it as the question whether nature can be taken as a natural sign of the existence of God, and certain features of nature as natural signs of certain of the divine attributes. I will consider here only the first question. Whether nature as a whole can be taken as a natural sign of the existence of God will depend on what we understand by 'natural sign.' Suppose we adopt Laird Addis' definition:

An entity is a natural sign if by its very nature, it represents some other entity or would-be entity, that is , if it is an intrinsically intentional entity. (Natural Signs: A Theory of Intentionality, Temple UP, 1989, p. 29)

I don't doubt that there are intrinsically intentional entities, thoughts (acts of thinking) being an example. Intrinsic intentionality is to be understood by contrast with derived intentionality. The intentionality or aboutness of a map, for example, is derivative, not intrinsic. A map is not about a chunk of terrain just in virtue of the map's intrinsic properties such as physical and geometrical properties. Suppose a neutron bomb wipes out all minded organisms. Maps and chunks of terrain remain. Do the maps in this scenario map anything, mean anything? No. This is because there are no minds to give the maps meaning.

Consider the contour lines on a topographical map. The closer together, the steeper the terrain. But that closer together should mean steeper is a meaning assigned and agreed upon by the community of map-makers and map-users. This meaning is not intrinsic to the map qua physical object. Closer together might have meant anything, e.g., that the likelihood of falling into an abandoned mine shaft is greater. The intentionality of the map and its features (contour lines, colors, etc.) is derivative from the intrinsic intentionality of minds.

So our question becomes this: Could nature be a natural sign in virtue of being intrinsically intentional? I don't think so. Nature can be taken or interpreted or read as pointing to God, but that would be a case of derivative intentionality: we would then be assigning to nature the property of pointing to God. But there is nothing intrinsic to nature that makes it point to God.

But of course one might mean something else by 'natural sign.' Fresh bear scat on a trail is a natural sign that a bear has been by recently. A natural sign in this sense is a bit of the natural world, or a modification of the natural world, that typically has a natural cause and that by its presence 'refers' us to this cause. The scat is the scat of a bear, but this 'of' is not the 'of' of intentionality. Similarly with the tracks of a mountain lion. They are typically caused by a mountain lion but they are not about a mountain lion.

Note the difference between the subjective and the objective genitive. The tracks of a mountain lion are a mountain lion's tracks (genitivus subjectivus) whereas the hiker's fear of a mountain lion is not a mountain lion's fear but the hiker's fear (genitivus objectivus). Both genitives can occur in one and the same sentence. My favorite example: Timor domini initium sapientiae. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. A second example: Obsidis metus mortis magnus est. The fear of death of the hostage is great. The hostage is the subject of fear; death the object. Analysis of this example in German here.

But I digress.

Could the natural world point to God in the way mountain lion tracks point to a mountain lion? Yes, if the natural world is the effect of a divine cause. But how do we know this? One cannot tell that the natural world is a created world just by observing it. Even if it is created, its createdness cannot be 'read off' from it. It can only be 'read into' it.

Now let me try to answer my reader's question. I take him to be asking the following question:

Q. Does the the natural world, by its sheer existence, directly show (i.e., show without the aid of auxiliary premises), that there exists a transcendent creator of the natural world?

If (Q) is the question, my answer is in the negative. This is invalid: the universe exists; ergo, God exists. This is valid: the universe exists; the universe is contingent; whatever contingently exists cannot exist as a matter of brute fact but must have a cause of its existence; nothing can cause its own existence; ergo, God as transcendent causa prima exists. Whether the second is a sound argument and how one would know it to be sound are of course further questions; it is, however, a valid argument.

But we had to bring in auxiliary premises. And similarly for this question:

Q*. Does the apparent designedness of the natural order directly show the existence of a transcendent designer?

And this one:

Q**. Does the beauty of "The starry skies above me" (Kant) directly show that this beauty has a transcendent Source which "all men call God" (Aquinas)?

Closely Related: Overbelief and Romans 1: 18-20

Stickin’ it to the Man

Check out this Harley-Davidson promotional video. A celebration of individuality by people who dress the same, ride the same make of motorcycle, and chant in unison.

"Some of us believe in the Man Upstairs, but all of us believe in stickin' it to the Man Down Here."

But without the Man Down Here there would be no roads, no gasoline, no science, no technology, no motorcycles, no law and order, no orderly context in which aging accountants and dentists could play at stickin' it to the Man on the weekends.

The Man is discipline, self-denial, repression, deferral of gratification, control of the instinctual. The Man is civilization, discontents and all. Without the Man there would be no one to stick it to, and nothing to stick it to him with. Adolescents of all ages need the Man to have someone to rebel against.

Still and all, after watching this video, what red-blooded American boomer doesn't want to rush out and buy himself a hog? Get your motor runnin', head out on the highway . . . .

Fragment of an Open Letter to Edmund Husserl on His Birthday

Edmund Husserl was born on this date in 1859.

Philosophy was the mission of my life. I had to philosophize otherwise I could not live in this world. (Here)

Dear Husserl,

It may be that the truth we need cannot be known in a way that satisfies modern scruples. Not everything worth knowing can be validated conclusively and with certainty within the confines of one's own subjectivity. It may be that one pays a high price to satisfy the modern scruples . . . .