Maverick Philosopher – Page 374 – Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Is a Dead Person Mortal?

To be mortal is to be subject to death just as to be breakable is to be subject to breakage. But whereas a wine glass is fragile/breakable even if there is no future time at which it breaks, a man is mortal only if there is a future time at which he dies. If there is no future time at which he dies, then he is immortal. This is what we usually mean by 'mortal' and 'immortal.'

But what about my mother? She is dead. Is she mortal? Having died, she cannot die again. So there is no future time at which she dies. It follows that she is not mortal if mortality requires a future time at which the mortal individual dies. On the other hand, she is surely not immortal in virtue of having died. Is she then neither mortal nor immortal? Are dead people indeterminate with respect to this distinction? Or perhaps the dead are wholly nonexistent and for this reason have no properties at all.

An Aporetic Tetrad

a. Socrates is mortal.
b. Socrates is dead.
c. A man is mortal only if there is a future time at which he dies.
d. A man cannot die twice.

The limbs cannot all be true, yet each makes a serious claim on our acceptance.

I have a solution in mind. But let's see what the Londonistas have to say.

Sally Boynton Brown: Ethno-Masochist

Thank you, Mr. Pollack, for saving me the work of excoriating this sorry specimen of leftist lunacy. Malcolm writes,

Behold Sally Boynton Brown, an industrial-strength ethno-masochist who wants both to “have a conversation” and “shut other white people down”.

(If you’re a student of political language, by the way, and you’re looking for examples of Orwellian phrases that mean exactly the opposite of what they say, it’s hard to beat “have a conversation”.)

I can’t think of any examples, throughout all of history, of any ethnic group despising themselves, and seeking their own abnegation and extinction, in the way that large numbers of white people are doing today. (I mean it: I’m really stumped here. Readers?)

Ms. Brown is standing for the job of head of the Democratic National Committee. I hope she gets it; she might even be a better choice than Keith Ellison.

'Have a conversation' is indeed Orwellian in the mouth of a leftist. It means shut up and acquiesce in everything we say. To which I respond: 'We are right and you are wrong and yet you have the chutzpah to try to shut us down?'

Spencer Case Reviews Larry Alex Taunton, The Faith of Christopher Hitchens

Well-written and even-handed, our friend Spencer's review makes me want to read the book.

America’s Second Civil War

Dennis Prager:

[Paleo] Liberalism — which was anti-left, pro-American and deeply committed to the Judeo-Christian foundations of America; and which regarded the melting pot as the American ideal, fought for free speech for its opponents, regarded Western civilization as the greatest moral and artistic human achievement and viewed the celebration of racial identity as racism — is now affirmed almost exclusively on the right and among a handful of people who don't call themselves conservative.

The left, however, is opposed to every one of those core principles of [paleo] liberalism.

Politics and Ridicule in a Post-Consensus Age

Is Man Basically Good?

BRIXISH

Nietzsche and the New Atheists

Barack Obama's Deplorable Race Relations Legacy

Susan Haack’s Reasonable Feminism

From an interview with Marty Nemko (HT: Dave Lull):

MN: In a number of papers, you propose what you call a humanist, individualist feminism very different from the kind of feminism now fashionable in the academy and elsewhere. Can you tell us more?

SH: My feminism is humanist because it stresses what all human beings have in common—that as Dorothy Sayers wrote, “Women are more like men than anything else on earth,” and it’s individualistic because it stresses that every woman has her own unique mélange of temperament, tastes, strengths, weaknesses, ideas, and opinions.

In contrast, today’s academic feminism, largely ignoring both what’s universal and what’s individual, stresses women-as-a-class. Sometimes it focuses on “women’s issues.” Sometimes it appeals to a supposed “woman’s point of view” or “women’s ways of knowing." Sometimes it goes as far as to decry science as an inherently masculinist enterprise.

I think this all has been bad for women, as well as bad for philosophy. It reinstates old, sexist stereotypes: “Feminist epistemology” will focus on emotion rather than reason, “feminist ethics” on caring rather than justice. It confuses inquiry with advocacy of “feminist values.” It encourages women into a pink-collar ghetto of feminist philosophy and makes it harder for those whose talent is for logic, history of philosophy, metaphysics, etc., to succeed.

Interviewers sometimes ask me, “How we can get more women into philosophy?” “That’s the wrong goal,” I reply. “The right goal is to make a person’s sex irrelevant to our assessment of the quality of his or her mind.” So I’m intrigued by recent empirical work suggesting that blinding the hiring process—as I urged decades ago—results in more diverse hires than diversity-training programs and the like.

I agree with the above.

Other Haack entries (some critical):

Genuine Inquiry and Two Forms of Pseudo-Inquiry

Philosophy Profession in Thrall of Dreadful Rankings

Susan Haack on the Fragmentation of Philosophy and the Road to Reintegration

Trump Against Abortion

Here:

President Trump on Monday reignited the war over abortion by signing an executive order blocking foreign aid or federal funding for international nongovernmental organizations that provide or "promote" abortions.

You conservative pro-life Never Trumpers are starting to look mighty stupid 'long about now, don't you think? You refused to support the one guy who could defeat Hillary and promote the policies that you claim to support.

The Willful Stupidity of Catholic Bishops

What explains it? It's enough to make a man swim the Tiber in reverse. Once more: Islam is not a religion of peace!

The Holocaust Argument for God’s Existence

Andrew Klavan, The Great Good Thing, Nelson, 2016, p. 231:

There are people who say that an evil as great as the Holocaust is proof there is no God. But I would say the opposite. The fact that it is so great an evil, so great that it defies any material explanation, implies a spiritual and moral framework that requires God's existence.

I've had a similar thought for years.

One can of course argue, plausibly, from the fact of evil to the nonexistence of God. From Epicurus to David Hume to J. L. Mackie, this has been a staple in the history of philosophy. There is no need to rehearse the logical and evidential arguments from evil to the nonexistence of God (See my Good and Evil category.) But one can argue, just as plausibly, from the fact of evil to the existence of God. I envisage two sorts of argument. One type argues that there could be no objective difference between good and evil without God. The other type, an instance of which will be sketched here, argues from a special feature of the evil in the world to the existence of God. This special feature is the horrific depth and intensity of moral evil, a phenomenon which beggars naturalistic understanding. This second type of argument is what Klavan is hinting at.

How might such an argument go? Here is a sketch. This is merely an outline, not a rigorous development.

I should also say that my aim is not to sketch a rationally compelling argument for the existence of God. There are no compelling arguments for substantive theses in philosophy and theology. My aim is to neutralize the atheist arguments from evil by showing that the tables can be turned: evil can just as easily be marshaled in support of God. Further, I have no illusions about neutralizing atheist arguments in the eyes of atheists. The purpose of the following is simply to show theists that their position is rationally defensible.

A. Consider not just the occurrence, but also the magnitude, of moral evil. I don't mean just the ubiquity of moral evil but also its horrific depth. Fidel Castro, for example, that hero of the Left, did not merely imprison his political opponents for their dissent, he had them tortured in unspeakable ways:

Mr. Valladares and other prisoners who refused ''political rehabilitation'' were forced to live in the greatest heat and the dampest cold without clothes. They were regularly beaten, shot at and sometimes killed; they were thrown into punishment cells, including the dreaded ''drawer cells,'' specially constructed units that make South Vietnam's infamous tiger cages seem like homey quarters. Eventually, together with several others, Mr. Valladares plotted an escape from their prison on the Isle of Pines. But the boat that was to pick them up never arrived. He and his accomplices were brought back to their cells and given no medical attention, though Mr. Valladares had fractured three bones in his foot during the escape attempt.

The retribution was swift. Mr. Valladares writes: ''Guards returned us to the cells and stripped us again. They didn't close the cell door, and that detail caught my attention. I was sitting on the floor; outside I heard the voices of several approaching soldiers. . . . They were going to settle accounts with us, collect what we owed them for having tried to escape. . . . They were armed with thick twisted electric cables and truncheons. . . . Suddenly, everything was a whirl – my head spun around in terrible vertigo. They beat me as I lay on the floor. One of them pulled at my arm to turn me over and expose my back so he could beat me more easily. And the cables fell more directly on me. The beating felt as if they were branding me with a red-hot branding iron, but then suddenly I experienced the most intense, unbearable, and brutal pain of my life. One of the guards had jumped with all his weight on my broken, throbbing leg.''

That treatment was typical. In the punishment cells, prisoners were kept in total darkness. Guards dumped buckets of urine and feces over the prisoners who warded off rats and roaches as they tried to sleep. Fungus grew on Mr. Valladares because he was not allowed to wash off the filth. Sleep was impossible. Guards constantly awoke the men with long poles to insure they got no rest. Illness and disease were a constant. Even at the end, when the authorities were approving his release, Mr. Valladares was held in solitary confinement in a barren room with fluorescent lights turned on 24 hours a day. By then he was partially paralyzed through malnutrition intensified by the lack of medical attention.

B. What explains the depth and ferocity of this evil-doing for which Communists, but not just them, are notorious? If you wrong me, I may wrong you back in proportional fashion to 'even the score' and 'give you a taste of your own medicine.' That's entirely understandable in naturalistic terms. You punch me, I punch you back, and now it's over. We're even. That may not be Christian behavior, but it's human behavior. But let's say you steal my guitar and I respond by microwaving your cat, raping your daughter, murdering your wife, and burning your house down. What explains the lack of proportionality? What explains the insane, murderous, inner rage in people, even in people who don't act on it? What turns ordinary Cubans into devils when they are given absolute power over fellow Cubans? There is something demonic at work here, not something merely animalic.

Can I prove that? Of course not. But neither can you prove the opposite.

Homo homini lupus does not capture the phenomenon. And it is an insult to the wolves to boot who are by (fallen) nature condemned to predation. Man is not a wolf to man, but a demon to man. No bestial man is merely bestial; he is beneath bestial in that he has freely chosen to degrade himself. His bestiality is spiritual. Only a spiritual being, a being possessing free will, can so degrade himself. Degrading themselves, the torturers then degrade their victims.

Now, dear reader, look deep into your own heart and see if there is any rage and hate there. And try to be honest about it. Is there a good naturalistic explanation for that cesspool of corruption in your own heart, when you have had, on balance, a good life? What explains the intensity and depth of the evil you find there and in Castro's henchmen, not to mention Stalin's, et al. What explains this bottomless, raging hate?

As a sort of inference to the best explanation we can say that moral evil in its extreme manifestations has a supernatural source. It cannot be explained adequately in naturalistic terms. There is an Evil Principle (and Principal) the positing of which is reasonable. The undeniable reality of evil has a metaphysical ground. Call it Satan or whatever you like.

C. It is plausible, then, to posit an Evil Principle to explain the full range and depth and depravity of moral evil. But Manicheanism is a non-starter. Good and Evil are not co-equal principles. Good is primary, Evil secondary and derivative. It cannot exist without Good. The doctrine that evil is privatio boni, a lack of good, does not explain the positive character of evil. But if there is an Evil One as the source of evil, then the positivity of evil can be charged to the Evil One's account. The positivity consists in the existence of the Evil One and his will; the privation in the Evil One's malevolent misuse of his free will. Satan is good insofar as he is: ens et bonum convertuntur. He is the ultimate source of evil in that his exercise of free will is malevolent.

D. If the existence of evil presupposes the existence of good, and evil exists in its prime instance as as an Evil Person, then good exists in its prime instance as God.

This sketch of an argument can be presented in a rigorous form with all the argumentative gaps plugged. But even then it won't be rationally compelling. No naturalist will accept the premise that there are some evils which require a supernatural explanation. He will hold to his naturalism come hell or high water and never give it up no matter how lame his particular explanations are. His attitude will be: there just has to be a naturalist/materialist explanation.

And so I say what I have said many times before. In the end, you must decide what you will believe about these ultimate matters, and how you will live. There are no knock-down arguments to guide you. And yet you ought to be able to give a rational account of what you believe and why. Hence the utility of the above sort of argument. It is not for convincing atheists but for articulating the views of theists.

Addendum (1/24). Paulo Juarez comments,

I just read your article regarding the Holocaust argument for the existence of God. It was gut-wrenching, as it was convincing in my eyes.

One line of argument worth considering (one that I sketch here) is that, on the supposition that the problem of evil is sound, and God does not exist, then presumably justice falls to us and no one else. But there is a disproportion between the justice we are able to administer, and the kind of justice everyone in their heart of hearts desires: justice for every person to ever live and to ever have lived [every person who will ever live and who has ever lived]. This desire for justice, unconditioned and absolute, can only be met if God exists, and so the very argument that is supposed to show an incompatibility between God and the existence of evil (particularly horrendous evils) fails to take into account that only if God exists, can there possibly be justice for the sufferer of evils (especially horrendous evils).

From there one could argue, either a) that our desire for justice unconditioned and absolute (call it 'cosmic justice') must have a corresponding object (God), or b) you could take a Pascalian route similar to the one we discussed last week.

Of course, an atheist could bite the bullet and say that there just are unredeemed and unredeemable evils. But then a different argument of mine kicks is, one that questions how an atheist could reasonablly affirm life as worth living given the fact of evil. See A Problem of Evil for Atheists.

Dolezal, Knowledge, and Belief

Soloveitchik on Proving the Existence of God

John Passmore on Entity-Monism and Existence-Monism

Sunday Cat Blogging!

Pussy riot, American style. An impotent response to Inaugural balls.

Cultural polluter Madonna has crowned herself poster girl of the pussy riot. Destructive leftists will justify as free speech her border-line incitement to violence. But the right to free speech is not absolute. Observations on Free Speech, #9:

9. To say that the right to free expression is a natural right is not to say that it is absolute. For the exercise of this right is subject to various reasonable and perhaps even morally obligatory restrictions, both in public and in private. There are limits on the exercise of the right in both spheres, but one has the right in both spheres. To have an (exercisable) right is one thing, to exercise it another, and from the fact that one has the right it does not follow that one has the right to its exercise in every actual and possible circumstance. If you say something I deem offensive in my house, on my blog, or while in my employ, then I can justifiably throw you out, or shut you up, or fire you and you cannot justify your bad behavior by invocation of the natural right to free speech. And similarly in public: the government is justified in preventing you from from shouting 'fire' in a crowded theater, to use the hackneyed example. You are not thereby deprived of the right; you are deprived of the right to exercise the right in certain circumstances.

The Central Dividing Line in American Politics

Here:

[Samuel] Huntington is most famous for arguing in The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order that the post-Cold War world would not be defined by the universalization of liberal values but by ethnic frictions within nations and civilizational clashes between them (the most volatile fault lines, he said, were between the West and Islam and the West and China). Even more prescient, at least as far as the United States is concerned, was Huntington’s 2004 book, Who Are We?, which described “nationalism versus cosmopolitanism” as the central dividing line in American politics, with immigration as its focal point.

Huntington identified two forms of cosmopolitanism—neoconservatism, popular on the right, which promised to bring America’s values to the world, and multiculturalism, popular on the left, which promised to bring the world’s values to America—both of which he attacked as destructive and unsustainable. The 2016 election campaign was one long demonstration of how right Huntington was, and how blind were his liberal and neoconservative critics who had no idea of the forces building in American politics.

The neocon mistake was to imagine that our superior system of government could be imposed on benighted and backward peoples riven by tribal hatreds and depressed by an inferior religion. The folly of that should now be evident. One cannot bomb the benighted into Enlightenment.

The mistake of the multi-culti cultural Marxists is to imagine that comity is possible without commonality, that wildly diverse sorts of people can live together in peace and harmony. Or at least that is one mistake of the politically correct multi-cultis.

Along comes Trump. Whatever you think of the man and his ostentation, self-absorption, slovenly speech, occasional feel-ups of members of the distaff contingent, and all the rest, he is a powerful vehicle of a necessary correction away from both forms of cosmopolitanism/globalism toward a saner view.

Donald J. Trump, the somewhat unlikely vehicle of a necessary correction. Without course correction the cliff is up ahead to be approached either by Donkey Express (Hillary) or more slowly but just as surely by Elephant (Jeb! and colleagues).

So how does the Left respond? In their usual vile and thoughtless way by the hurling of such epithets as sexist, Islamophobic, xenophobic, racist, fascist . . . you know the litany. According to Chris Mathews of MSNBC, Trump's inaugural speech was "Hitlerian."

The alacrity with which these leftist bums reach for the Hitler comparison shows the poverty of their 'thought.'

Addendum. Tony Bevin writes:

In your post you write:

The neocon mistake was to imagine that our superior system of government could be imposed on benighted and backward peoples riven by tribal hatreds and depressed by an inferior religion. The folly of that should now be evident. One cannot bomb the benighted into Enlightenment.

This is of a mind with Milton Friedman's observation about the Euro. He noted that one cannot impose a common currency that is not supported by a common political will [emphasis added by BV]and gave the Euro 10 years before it became extinct.

I think he (and you above) are correct. Friedman may have only been wrong about the timeline. By the way, the Euro, which consistently traded at about $1.33 is now down to the $1.02-$1.05 range and Deutsche Wealth management expects it to be about $0.85 toward the end of this year. With Brexit, Italexit and other countries beginning to discuss the possibility of leaving the EU, is the beginning of the end near? We shall see.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Musical Instruments

Billy Joel, Piano Man. A great slice of pure Americana.

Johnny Cymbal, Mr. Bass Man, 1963

Bob Dylan, Mr. Tambourine Man, 1964. Philip Larkin is supposed to have called this the greatest song ever written. Don't believe me? See here:

Like Thwaite, Hartley is insistent that Larkin loved women; nor will she go along with the idea of him as a miser. When she won a place at university as a mature student, Larkin, knowing how hard-up Hartley was, opened a book account for her, and placed a fat sum in it. She is full of stories about him: the time they went to see Louis Armstrong together in Bridlington; the time Larkin arrived at a party clutching a bottle of crème de menthe. She reminds me – so unlikely seeming, this – that he thought Dylan's "Mr Tambourine Man" the best song ever written. Larkin, who once described his physique as being like that of a "pregnant salmon", hated dancing, but at departmental Christmas parties, he would be sure to ask every woman in the room to dance: cleaners, caterers, library assistants. No one was left out.

Linda Ronstadt, Different Drum

Eric Clapton, et al., While My Guitar Gently Weeps

Paul Anka, A Steel Guitar and a Glass of Wine Now when was the last time you heard this one?

Sandy Nelson, Let There Be Drums

Dave Cortez, The Happy Organ

The Evil of Ignorance

It is an evil state we are in, ignorant as we are of the ultimate why and wherefore.

The topic of birthdays came up among some friends. I said I don't celebrate mine: my birth befell me; it was not my doing. A female companion replied that life is a gift to which my response was that that is a question, not a given. It is not clear that life is a gift or even a good. Equally, it is not clear that it is a mistake (Schopenhauer) and something bad.

Human life is a problem the solution to which we do not know. One can only have faith that life is good, and I do. It is a reasoned not a blind faith. But that I lack knowledge and need faith is itself something evil. There are far worse evils, of course.

The issue of procreation — pun intended — makes the question concrete. To procreate deliberately and responsibly is to act on the conviction that conception, birth, and the predictable sequel are good. But that is not known given the powerful counter-evidence that pessimists provide.

So again one is thrown back on faith. To need faith is to lack knowledge and by my lights this lack is a privatio boni and insofar forth evil.

Readers will of course disagree with me and disagree among themselves as to what merits disagreement. This is just further evidence that our predicament is suboptimal.

If you want to think about the problem of evil in its full sweep you ought to include the evil of ignorance in all its forms. And you ought to bear in mind that evil is not a problem for theists alone.

Intentionality, Potentiality, and Dispositionality: Some Points of Analogy

The influential Austrian philosopher Franz Brentano took intentionality to be the mark of the mental, the criterion whereby physical and mental phenomena are distinguished. For Brentano, (i) all mental phenomena are intentional, (ii) all intentional phenomena are mental, and (iii) no mental phenomenon is physical. (Franz Brentano, Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt (1874), Bk. II, Ch. 1.)

What is intentionality? ‘Intentionality’ is Brentano's term of art (borrowed from the Medievals) for that property of mental states whereby they are (non-derivatively) of, or about, or directed to, an object. Such states are intrinsically such that they 'take an accusative.' The state of perceiving, for example is necessarily object-directed. One cannot just perceive; if one perceives, then one perceives something. The idea is not merely that when one perceives one perceives something or other; the idea is that when one perceives, one perceives some specific object, the very object of that very act. The same goes for intending (in the narrow sense), believing, imagining, recollecting, wishing, willing, desiring, loving, hating, judging, knowing, etc. Such mental states refer beyond themselves to objects that may or may not exist, or may or may not be true in the case of propositional objects. Reference to an object is thus an intrinsic feature of mental states and not a feature they have in virtue of a relation to an existing object. This is why Brentano speaks of the "intentional in-existence of an object." It is also why Husserl can 'bracket' the existence of the object for phenomenological purposes. Intentionality is not a relation, strictly speaking, though it is relation-like. This is an important point that many contemporaries seem incapable of wrapping their heads around.

There are some interesting points of analogy between intentionality and potentiality. An intentional state exhibits

a. directedness to an object
b. an object that may or may nor exist
c. an object that may be, and typically is, indeterminate or incomplete.

Nat Hentoff, Defender of Human Life (1925-2017)

I have been a fan of Nat Hentoff ever since I first read him in the pages of Down Beat magazine way back in the '60s. He died at 91 on January 7th. My tribute to him is a repost from 4 June 2012:

A Prime Instance of Political Correctness: The Blackballing of Nat Hentoff

Nat Hentoff is a civil libertarian and a liberal in an older and respectable sense of the term. He thinks for himself and follows the arguments and evidence where they lead. So what do contemporary politically correct liberals do? They attack him. His coming out against abortion particularly infuriated them. Mark Judge comments:

Hentoff's liberal friends didn't appreciate his conversion: "They were saying, 'What's the big fuss about? If the parents had known she was going to come in this way, they would have had an abortion. So why don't you consider it a late abortion and go on to something else?' Here were liberals, decent people, fully convinced themselves that they were for individual rights and liberties but willing to send into eternity these infants because they were imperfect, inconvenient, costly. I saw the same attitude on the part of the same kinds of people toward abortion, and I thought it was pretty horrifying."

The reaction from America's corrupt fourth estate was instant. Hentoff, a Guggenheim fellow and author of dozens of books, was a pariah. Several of his colleagues at the Village Voice, which had run his column since the 1950s, stopped talking to him. When the National Press Foundation wanted to give him a lifetime achievement award, there was a bitter debate amongst members whether Hentoff should even be honored (he was). Then they stopped running his columns. You heard his name less and less. In December 2008, the Village Voice officially let him go.

When journalist Dan Rather was revealed to have poor news judgment, if not outright malice, for using fake documents to try and change the course of a presidential election, he was given a new TV show and a book deal — not to mention a guest spot on The Daily Show. The media has even attempted a resuscitation of anti-Semite Helen Thomas, who was recently interviewed in Playboy.

By accepting the truth about abortion, and telling that truth, Nat Hentoff may be met with silence by his peers when he goes to his reward. The shame will be theirs, not his.

Hats Off to Hentoff: Abortion and Obama

Hats Off to Hentoff: "Pols Clueless on Ground Zero Mosque"

Nat Hentoff on 'Hate Crime' Laws

Helen Thomas Disgraces Herself

Hentoff thinks that one cannot consistently oppose abortion and support capital punishment. I believe he is quite mistaken about that.

Fetal Rights and the Death Penalty: Consistent or Inconsistent?

Vindictive Obama Sticks it to the Nation Once More on the Way Out the Door

Krauthammer:

Commuting the sentence of Chelsea Manning, one of the great traitors of our time, is finger-in-the-eye willfulness. Obama took 28 years off the sentence of a soldier who stole and then released through WikiLeaks almost half a million military reports, plus another quarter-million State Department documents.

The cables were embarrassing; the military secrets were almost certainly deadly. They jeopardized the lives not just of American soldiers on two active fronts — Iraq and Afghanistan — but of locals who were, at great peril, secretly aiding and abetting us. After Manning’s documents release, the Taliban “went on a killing spree” (according to intelligence sources quoted by Fox News) of those who fit the description of individuals working with the United States.

See also Mark Tooley, Bradley Manning, Alger Hiss, and Dean Acheson.