The Clintons. Invective courtesy of Judge Jeanine Pirro. Last night on Hannity. Modeled on Hillary's "basket of deplorables." Invective has its place in the armamentarium of the conservative. Lying crooks cannot be engaged on the plane of reason via calm conversation. Conservatives need to learn how to punch back.
Creation: Ex Nihilo or Ex Deo?
Classical theists hold that God created the world ex nihilo, out of nothing. This phrase carries a privative, not a positive, sense: it means not out of something as opposed to out of something called ‘nothing.’ This much is crystal clear. Less clear is how creation ex nihilo (CEN), comports, if it does comport, with the following hallowed principle:
ENN: Ex nihilo nihit fit. Nothing comes from nothing.
The latter principle seems intuitively obvious. It is not the case that something comes from nothing. Had there been nothing at all, there would not now be anything. (ENN) is not, however, a logical truth. A logical truth is one whose negation is a formal-logical contradiction. Negating (ENN) yields: something comes from nothing. This is logically possible in that no contradiction is involved in the notion that something come to be out of nothing. Logical possibility notwithstanding, that is hard to swallow. Rather than explain why — a fit topic for yet another post — I will assume for present purposes that (ENN) is a necessary truth of metaphysics. It is surely plausible. (And if true, then necessarily true.) Had there been nothing at all, there would have been nothing to 'precipitate' the arisal of anything. (But also nothing to prevent the arisal of something.)
You are not philosophizing until you have a problem. My present problem is this: If (ENN) is true, how can (CEN) be true? How can God create out of nothing if nothing can come from nothing? It would seem that our two principles form an inconsistent dyad. How solve it?
It would be unavailing to say that God, being omnipotent, can do anything, including making something come out of nothing. For omnipotence, rightly understood, does not imply that God can do anything, but that God can do anything that it is possible to do. But there are limits on what is possible. For one thing, logic limits possibility, and so limits divine power: not even God can make a contradiction true. There are also non-logical limits on divine power: God cannot restore a virgin. There are past events which possess a necessitas per accidens that puts them beyond the reach of the divine will. Nor can God violate (ENN), given that it is necessarily true. God's will is subject to necessary truths. Necessary truths, like all truths, are accusatives of the divine intellect and so cannot exist unless the divine intellect exists. The divine intellect limits the divine will.
Admittedly, what I just stated, though very plausible, is not obvious. Distinguished philosophers have held that the divine will is not limited in the way I have described. But to enter this can of worms would take us too far afield, to mix a couple of metaphors. So we add to our problem the plausible background assumption that there are logical and non-logical limits on divine power.
So the problem remains: How can God create the world out of nothing if nothing can come from nothing? How can we reconcile (CEN) with (ENN)?
One response to the problem is to say that (CEN), properly understood, states that God creates out of nothing distinct from himself. Thus he does not operate upon any pre-given matter, nor does he bestow existence on pre-given essences, nor create out of pre-given possibles. God does not create out of pre-given matter, essences, or mere possibilia. But if God creates out of nothing distinct from himself, this formulation allows that, in some sense, God creates ex Deo, out of himself. Creating the world out of himself, God creates the world out of nothing distinct from himself. In this way, (CEN) and (ENN) are rendered compatible.
In sum, ‘Creatio ex nihilo’ is ambiguous. It could mean that God creates out of nothing, period, in which case (CEN) collides with (ENN), or that God creates out of nothing ultimately distinct from himself. My proposal is that the Latin phrase be construed in the second of these ways. So construed, it has the sense of ‘creatio ex Deo.’
But what exactly does it mean to say that God creates out of God? A critic once rather uncharitably took me to mean precisely what I do not mean, namely, that God creates out of God in a way that implies that the product of the creative operation (creation in the sense of created entities) is identical to its operator (God) and its operand (God). That would amount to an absurd pantheism in which all distinctions are obliterated, a veritable "night in which all cows are black," to borrow a phrase from Hegel.
When I say that God creates ex Deo what I mean is that God operates on entities that are not external to God in the sense of having existence whether or not God exists. I build a rock cairn to mark the trail by piling up otherwise scattered rocks. These rocks exist whether or not I do. My creation of the cairn is therefore neither out of nothing nor out of me but out of materials external to me. If God created in that way he would not be God as classically conceived, but a Platonic demiurge.
So I say that God creates out of ‘materials’ internal to him in the sense that their existence depends on God’s existence and are therefore in this precise sense internal to him. (I hope it is self-evident that materials need not be made out of matter.) In this sense, God creates ex Deo rather than out of materials that are provided from without. It should be obvious that God, a candidate for the status of an absolute, cannot have anything ‘outside him.’
To flesh this out a bit, suppose properties are concepts in the divine mind. Then properties are necessary beings in that they exist in all metaphysically possible worlds just as God does. The difference, however, is that properties have their necessity from another, namely God, while God has his necessity from himself. (This distinction is in Aquinas.) In other words, properties, though they are necessary beings, depend for their existence on God. If, per impossibile, God were not to exist, then properties, and indeed the entire Platonic menagerie (as Plantinga calls it) would not exist.
Suppose that properties are the ‘materials’ or ontological constituents out of which concrete contingent individuals – thick particulars in Armstrong’s parlance – are constructed. (This diverges somewhat from what I say in A Paradigm Theory of Existence, but no matter: it is a simplification for didactic purposes.) We can then say that the existence of contingent individual C is just the unity or contingent togetherness of C’s ontological constituents. C exists iff C’s constituents are unified. Creating is then unifying. (We have a model for this unifying in our own unification of a sensory manifold in the unity of one consciousness.) Since the constituents are necessary beings, they are uncreated. But since their necessity derives from God, they are not independent of God.
In this sense, God creates out of himself: he creates out of materials that are internal to his own mental life. It is ANALOGOUS to the way we create objects of imagination. (I am not saying that God creates the world by imagining it.) When I construct an object in imagination, I operate upon materials that I myself provide. Thus I create a purple right triangle by combining the concept of being purple with the concept of being a right triangle. I can go on to create a purple cone by rotating the triangle though 360 degrees on the y-axis. The object imagined is wholly dependent on me the imaginer: if I leave off imagining it, it ceases to exist. I am the cause of its beginning to exist as well as the cause of its continuing to exist moment by moment. But the object imagined, as my intentional object, is other than me just as the creature is other than God. The creature is other than God while being wholly dependent on God just as the object imagined is other than me while being wholly dependent on me.
A critic thinks that "The notion of total dependence, dependence in every respect, entails identity, and therefore no dependence at all. If a is dependent on b in all respects, then a ‘collapses’ into b, taking dependency, and difference, with it." So if the creature is dependent on God both for its existence and for its nature, the creature collapses into God. And of course we can’t have that. It is obvious that the manifest plurality of the world, the difference of things from one another and from God, must be maintained. We cannot allow a pantheism according to which God just is the world, nor one on which God swallows up the plural world and its plurality with it.
The principle lately quoted is refuted by every intentional object qua intentional object. The object imagined is totally dependent in its existence on my acts of imagining. After all, I excogitated it: in plain Anglo-Saxon, I thought it up, or out. This excogitatum, to give it a name, is wholly dependent on my cogitationes and on the ego ‘behind’ these cogitationes if there is an ego ‘behind’ them. (Compare Sartre’s critique of Husserl on this score in the former’s Transcendence of the Ego.) But this dependence is entirely consistent with the excogitatum’s being distinct both from me qua ego, and from the intentional acts or cogitationes emanating from the ego and directed upon the excogitatum. To press some Husserlian jargon into service, the object imagined ist kein reeller Inhalt, it is not "really contained" in the act. The object imagined is neither immanent in the act, nor utterly transcendent of the act: it is a transcendence in immanence. It is ‘constituted’ as a transcendence in immanence.
The quoted principle may also be refuted by more mundane examples, examples that I would not use to explain the relation between creator and creature. Consider a wrinkle W in a carpet C. W is distinct from C. This is proven by the fact that they differ property-wise: the wrinkle is located in the Northeast corner of the carpet, but the carpet is not located in the Northeast corner of the carpet. (The principle here is the Indiscernibility of Identicals.) But W is wholly (totally) dependent on C. A wrinkle in a carpet cannot exist without a carpet; indeed, it cannot exist apart from the very carpet of which it is the wrinkle. Thus W cannot ‘migrate’ from carpet C to carpet D. Not only is W dependent for its existence on C, but W is dependent on C for its nature (whatness, quiddity). For W just is a certain modification of the carpet, and the whole truth about W can be told in C-terms. So W is totally dependent on C.
So dependence in both essence and existence does not entail identity.
Somehow the reality of the Many must be upheld. The plural world is no illusion. If Advaita Vedanta maintains that it is an illusion, then it is false. On the other hand, the plural world is continuously dependent for its existence on the One. Making sense of this relation is not easy, and I don't doubt that my analogy to the relation of finite mind and its intentional objects limps in various ways.
In any case, one thing seems clear: there is a problem with reconciling CEN with EEN. The reconciliation sketched here involves reading creatio ex nihilo as creatio ex Deo. The solution is not pantheistic, but panentheistic. It is not that all is God, but that all is in God.
I discuss and reject a different solution to the problem in On Reconciling Creatio Ex Nihilo with Ex Nihilo Nihil Fit.
Meaning is Tied to Use; Syntax Too?
It would seem so. Consider the way Peggy Noonan, no slouch of a political commentator, uses the adjective 'crazy' in this passage about Donald Trump:
He had to be a flame-haired rebuke to the establishment. He in fact had to be a living insult—no political experience, rude, crude ways—to those who’ve failed us. He had to leave you nervous, on the edge of your seat. Only that man could have broken through. Crazy was a feature, not a bug. (The assumption seemed to be he could turn crazy on and off. I believe he has demonstrated he can’t.)
That is perfectly intelligible of course, even though Noonan uses 'crazy' twice as a noun.
The syntactical difference between noun and adjective no doubt remains in place; it is just that a word that traditionally was always used as an adjective is here used as a noun, as a stand-in for the abstract substantive, 'craziness.' A bit earlier in her piece, Noonan uses 'crazy' as an adjective.
(Can you adduce a counterexample to my 'always' above?)
No word has a true or real or intrinsic meaning that somehow attaches to the word essentially regardless of contextual factors. Is the same true of syntactical category? Can every word 'jump categories'? Or only some?
For a long time now, verbs have been used as nouns. 'Jake sent me an invite to his Halloween party.' 'How much does the install cost?' 'An engine overhaul will cost you more the vehicle is worth.' How far can it go? Will tire rotations ever be advertised as 'tire rotates'? 'I thought the rotate was part of the deal!'
Some words have always (?) had a dual use as verbs and nouns. 'Torch,' might be an example.
'I' is an interesting case. (I mean the word, not the English majuscule letter or the Roman numeral.) 'I' is the first-person singular pronoun. But it can also be used as a noun.
Suppose a Buddhist says, 'There is no I.' Is his utterance gibberish? Could I reasonably reply to the Buddhist: What you've said, Bud, is nonsense on purely syntactical grounds. So it is neither true not false.
More later.
The MavPhil Make-Up Principle
Any day on which blogging is 'light' or nonexistent must be followed by a day on which blogging is 'heavy.'
The only exceptions are those times of Extended Unplug when the sane blogger retreats within the Inner Citadel for rest and recuperation.
Do You Want a Couple of Grifters Back in the White House?
No? Then you'd better vote for Trump. Hillary and Billary are Grifters-in-Chief.
HillaryCare
That's what it was called before it was called ObamaCare. If you don't like the latter, then you'd better vote for Trump. It might be in your best interest to inform yourself on this matter.
My Defective ObamaCare Health Insurance Product Just Blew Up
Liberal Voter Identification
A death certificate will do.
(Adapted from a Dennis Miller riff I heard last night on The O'Reilly Factor.)
The serious point here is that the Left is bent on voting fraud. The clearest and simplest proof of this is their mindless and transparently sophistical opposition to photo ID.
Someone ought to make a movie, set in Chicago: The Night of the Voting Dead.
On Mocking Religious Figures
My view in a few words.
Other things being equal, one should not mock, deride, or engage in any sort of unprovoked verbal or pictorial assault on people or the beliefs they cherish. So if Muslims were as benign as Christians or Buddhists, I would object on moral grounds to the depiction and mockery of the man Muslims call the Prophet despite the legality of so doing. But things are not equal. Radical Islam is the main threat to civilized values in the world today. Deny that, and you are delusional as Sam Harris says. The radicals are testing us and provoking us. We must respond with mockery and derision at a bare minimum. The 'Use it or lose it' principle applies not only to one's body, but to one's rights as well. For the defense of liberty, the enemies of our rights must be in our sights, figuratively at least, and this includes radical Islam's leftist enablers.
Hillary, for example, who won't even call it what it is.
An Orthodox Rabbi Supports Trump
Here.
How does one explain to a victim of an unfortunate appellate panel’s ruling that “I could have voted for a federal judiciary that would protect the Constitution and refrain from legislating from the bench, but a braggart was recorded 11 years earlier, boasting in filthy terms, saying that he then did filthy, disgusting things that were less filthy and disgusting than what his opponent actively defended her husband and clients for doing. So I am sorry for losing the federal judiciary. And for abandoning America’s influence in the world. And for allowing more destructive drugs to enter the country illegally by permitting the border to become even more porous. And for the economy remaining mired with no meaningful job growth or income gains. And for the loss of affordable health coverage and for losing access to preferred doctors. And for not voting finally for change to stem the steep decline in the Judaeo-Christian religious and social values that built this great country and that shaped America’s extraordinary character.”
Justice Thomas: “. . . so politically incorrect that he may not even be black.”
Edward J. Erler, Last Chance to Defeat Political Correctness? Excerpt (exphasis added):
. . . Progressive Liberals have viciously criticized Justice Clarence Thomas for refusing to represent his racial class on the Supreme Court. He sees his duty, instead, as following the rule of law and the Constitution. When the law classifies on the basis of race or attempts to promote racial class interests, he has written many times, it undermines the rule of law by violating the crucial principal that all persons are equal before the law. Progressive Liberals despise Thomas for arguing that “benign” racial classifications to benefit racial classes or groups are morally equivalent to invidious racial classifications designed to harm or disadvantage racial or ethnic groups. Race, an arbitrary, inessential feature of the human persona, has no role to play in the rule of law. Since rights belong to individuals, Thomas correctly insists, they are not conditioned by the racial class an individual happens to occupy.
Justice Thomas is so politically incorrect that he may not even be black. (We “cannot tell every story,” says the Smithsonian Institution about Thomas’s absence from the new National Museum of African American History and Culture.) If race is as much a political fact as a biological one, then the failure or refusal to promote a group’s interests and identity nullifies membership in that group. Conversely, Bill Clinton was acclaimed America’s first black president.
The vicious insanity of contemporary liberals is truly mind-boggling. But that's nothing new. What may be worth pointing out, however, is that the bolded passage, with which I fully agree, is contested not only by leftists but also by alt-rightists and neo-reactionaries.
Both groups, while otherwise at each other's throats, jump into the same bed when it comes to the importance of 'blood.' Both groups favor an identity politics in which race is an essential determinant of one's very identity. I have a post (56 comments) in which I lament the tribal identification of so many blacks and in which I recommend getting beyond tribal identifications. But certain 'alties' or NRs would have none of it: they think that the right response to black tribalism is white tribalism.
In another post I cited the Declaration's "all men are created equal," which elicited from an NR the riposte that it is false! The response displayed a failure to grasp that the famous declaration in the Declaration is not an empirical claim about the properties and powers of human animals whether as individuals or as groups, but a normative claim about persons as rights-possessors.
Some good points are made by some on the Alternative Right. But their response to the insane extremism of the Left is — wait for it — a reaction that is also extreme, though not insane. Trads and the alties share some common ground, so dialogue is possible; but self-enstupidated leftists are beyond the pale of dialogue. They are enemies that have to be defeated, not fellow rational beings with whom it would make sense to have a conversation. One hopes that their defeat can be achieved politically; but extrapolitical means remain 'on the table.'
A lot rides on the concept of person when it comes to differentiating a tenable conservatism from the reactionary particularism of the Alt Right. A separate post will sketch a personalist conservatism.
Do You Value Religious Liberty?
Then you had better vote for Trump. U. S. Civil Rights Commission Targets Religious Liberty.
Why Women are Under-Represented in Philosophy: A Politically Incorrect View
TRIGGER WARNING! Clear, critical, and independent thinking up ahead. All girly-girls, pajama boys, and crybullies out of the room and to their safe spaces and sandboxes. If you play nice, Uncle Bill may serve milk and cookies.
The following is excerpted from a much longer discussion with some alt-rightists/neo-reactionaries. I am not one of them. I am more of a traditional conservative. But the alties and the trads agree in their opposition to the effete and epicene, spineless and supine, go-a-long-to-get-along, yap-and-scribble, do-nothing, milque-toast 'conservatives.'
……………………..
Differences in social role as between the sexes are grounded in hard biological facts. The biological differences between men and women are not 'social constructs.' The male sex hormone testosterone is not a 'social construct' although the words 'hormone' and 'testosterone' and the theory in which which they figure are. That women are better at nurturing than men is grounded in their biological constitution, which lies deeper than the social. This is not to say that all women are good at raising and nurturing children. 'Woman are nurturers' is a generic statement, not a universal statement. It is like the statement, 'Men are taller than women.' It does not mean that every man is taller than every woman.
Does it follow from the obvious biologically-grounded difference between men and women that women should be discouraged from pursuing careers outside the home and entering the professions? Here I begin to diverge from my alt-right interlocutors. They don't like talk of equal rights though I cannot see why a woman should not have the same right to pursue a career in medicine or engineering or mathematics or philosophy as a man if she has the aptitude for it. (But of course there must be no erosion of standards.) How do our alt-rightist/NRs, who do not like talk of equality, protect women from men who would so dominate them as to prevent them from developing their talents? On the other hand, men as a group are very different from women as a group. So we should not expect equal outcomes. It should come as no surprise that women are 'under-represented' in STEM fields, or in philosophy.
Why are women 'under-represented' in philosophy? Because women as a group are not as good at it as men as a group, because women as a group are not as interested in it as men as a group, and because the feminine nature is conciliatory and averse to what they perceive as the aggressive, combative, and hostile aspects of philosophical dialectic. This is surely a large part, if not the whole, of the explanation, especially given the Affirmative Action advantage women have enjoyed over the past half a century.
The hostility often felt by women reflects something about the nature of philosophy, namely, that its very lifeblood is dialectic and argument. Argument can be conducted civilly, often is, and of course ought to be. But it still looks to the female nature as a sort of 'fighting,' a sublimated form of the physical combat that men are wont to engage in, even when dialectic at its best is no such thing. So there is something in the nature of philosophy and something about females that explains their 'under-representation.' Those are sneer quotes, by the way. Anyone with an ounce of philosophical intelligence can see that the word I am sneering at conflates the factual and the normative. Therefore it shouldn't be used without sneer quotes.
You cannot refute my point about women by citing women who like the blood-sport aspect of philosophy. They are the exceptions that prove the rule. Harriet Baber, for example, who is Jewish and exemplifies the Jewish love of dialectic, writes:
I *LIKE* the blood-sport aspect of philosophy. To me, entering my first philosophy class, freshman year (1967) and discovering that you were not only allowed to fight but that the teacher actually encouraged it was liberating. As a girl, I was constantly squeezed and suppressed into being "nice" and non-confrontational. I was under chronic stress holding back, trying to fudge, not to be too clear or direct. But, mirabile dictu: I got into the Profession and through my undergrad, and, oh with a vengeance in grad school at Johns Hopkins, everything I had been pushed throughout my childhood to suppress, and which I failed to suppress adequately to be regarded as "normal," was positively encouraged.
Anecdote. I once roomed with an analytic philosopher at a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute. I recall a remark he made about philosophical discussion: "If you are not willing to become a bit of an asshole about it, you are not taking it seriously." The guy was obnoxious, but he was right. In a serious discussion, things can get a little tense. The feminine nature shies away from contention and dispute.
If you deny that, then you have no knowledge of human nature and no experience of life. Ever wonder why women are 'over-represented' among realtors? It is because they excel men when it comes to conciliation and mediation. I don't mean this as a snarky put-down of the distaff contingent. I mean it as praise. And if females do not take it as praise are they not assuming the superiority of male virtues?
It is a non sequitur to think that if the Xs are 'under-represented' among the Ys, then the Xs must have been the victims of some unjust discrimination. Men are 'under-represented' among massage therapists, but the explanation is obvious and harmless: men like to have their naked bodies rubbed by women in dark rooms, but women feel uncomfortable having their naked bodies rubbed by men in dark rooms. It is not as if there is some sort of sexism, 'institutional' or individual, that keeps men out of massage therapy.
Blacks are 'over-represented' in the NFL and the NBA. Is that because of some racism 'institutional' or individual, that keeps whitey out? Of course not. Blacks are better than whites at football and basketball. Jews are just terrible. Chess is their athletics. Jews dominate in the chess world. Is that because the goyim have been suppressed?
Does my talk of blacks and Jews make me a racist and an anti-Semite ? To a liberal-left dumb-ass, yes. For they are incapable of distinguishing between a statement whose content is race and a racist statement.
As it seems to me, I am treading a via media between the excesses of the neo-reactionaries and the even worse excesses of the leftists. My challenge to the NRs: How can you fail to see the importance of equal treatment of men and women? One of the NRs claimed that the notion of equality of opportunity is vacuous. Why? To require that applicants for a job not be discriminated against on the basis of race, sex, or creed, is not vacuous. It has a definite content. That it could use some spelling out is not to the point. What I mean is this. Some creeds are such that people who hold them must be discriminated against. Suppose you are an orthodox Muslim: you subscribe to Sharia and hold that it takes precedence over the U. S. Constitution. You ought to be discriminated against. You ought not be allowed to immigrate. The U. S. Constitution is not a suicide pact. This is a point that Dr. Ben Carson made a while back in connection with eligibility to become POTUS. But the scumbags of the Left willfully misrepresented him.
For more on this exciting topic, I send you to Rightly Considered where a brief entry by Criticus Ferox has ignited a lively discussion.
Time Balm
Time flattens the peaks of emotion and fills the valleys of despond. Tormentors from the past are now shades pale and insubstantial, too weak to haunt. Absence wins out over presence. One needn't work at the purgation of memory: time does the work for us.
Existence and Divine Simplicity: A Stroll Along the Via Negativa with Maimonides
Here is an important passage from Moses Maimonides (1138-1204), The Guide to the Perplexed, Dover, p. 80:
It is known that existence is an accident appertaining to all things, and therefore an element superadded to their essence. This must evidently be the case as regards everything the existence of which is due to some cause: its existence is an element superadded to its essence. But as regards a being whose existence is not due to any cause — God alone is that being, for His existence, as we have said, is absolute — existence and essence are perfectly identical; He is not a substance to which existence is joined as an accident, as an additional element. His existence is always absolute, and has never been a new element or an accident in Him. Consequently God exists without possessing the attribute of existence. Similarly He lives, without possessing the attribute of life; knows, without possessing the attribute of knowledge; is omnipotent without possessing the attribute of omnipotence; is wise, without possessing the attribute of wisdom: all this reduces itself to one and the same entity; there is no plurality in Him, as will be shown.
God is the Absolute. As such, he is radically other than creatures. God is not just another thing that exists and possesses properties in the way creatures possess properties. He differs from creatures in his mode of existence, his mode of property-possession, his mode of necessity, and his mode of uniqueness. See the following recent posts: God is Uniquely Unique and The Anthropomorphism of Perfect-Being Theology.
Existence accedes to creatures; it is accidental to them. As Maimonides says, existence is "superadded to their essence." This implies a real composition of essence and existence in creatures. But in God there can be no such composition. God does not have existence; he is his existence. As Maimonides puts it, "God exists without possessing the attribute of existence." And similarly for properties such as wisdom and omniscience, etc. God is wise without possessing the attribute of wisdom.
That is a hard saying. Does it make sense? And what sense does it make?
First we need to understand what is being maintained. There are those who will say that there are no properties/attributes but that nonetheless there are true predications. This is the position of the extreme nominalist. Accordingly, 'Socrates is wise' is true but there is nothing in reality picked out by the predicate 'wise' or '___wise' that grounds the correctness of the application of the predicate to the individual. There are predicates but no properties. That is to say: 'Wise' is correctly predicated of Socrates despite the fact that there is nothing in reality that Socrates instantiates or otherwise has in virtue of which Socrates is wise.
This is not what Maimonides is saying. He is not denying that there are properties/attributes. I take him to be saying two things. First, God does not have or possess his attributes. He does not have them by standing in a relation of instantiation to them, nor does he have them as ontological 'parts.' Second, none of the divine attributes is an attribute of creatures.
As for the first point, God does not have his attributes; he is (identically) them. God is radically One. His unity is so 'tight' as to disallow any internal composition or stucturation. And his absoluteness disallows his standing in relation to any properties or factors distinct from him on which he would be dependent for his nature or existence. Thus God does not have existence and wisdom; he is existence and wisdom. The second point, I think, follows from the first: the wisdom of Socrates cannot be the same attribute as the wisdom of God.
On the semantic plane, the two occurrences of the predicate 'wise' in 'Socrates is wise' and 'God is wise' cannot have the same sense. For if they have the same sense, then they pick out the same property; but there cannot be one and the same property of wisdom shared by God and Socrates given that God, but not Socrates, is identical to wisdom. Therefore there is no univocity across the two sentences with respect to the predicate. As I read Maimonides, he holds that 'wise' is equivocal in its human and divine uses.
Maimonides and his fellow travellers on the via negativa are radical foes of even the most sophisticated forms of anthropomorphism. Socrates is powerful. The anthropomorphizer says that God too is powerful and in the very same sense; it is just that whereas the philosopher's power is limited, God's power is maximal. Someone who thinks along these lines is placing God and Socrates on the same scale or order, when God, if absolute and truly transcendent, is "trans-ordinal" to borrow word from Henri Dumery. What the anthropomorphizer does is take some of the attributes of humans and think of God as having those very same attributes.
But if we go the Maimonides route, what do we do with a sentence such as 'God is powerful'? Must we say that it is nonsense? We know what it means to say that Socrates is powerful. But what could it mean to say that God is powerful if the predicate is equivocal across 'Socrates is powerful' and 'God is powerful'? Note also that the subject-predicate form of 'God is powerful' implies a distinction in its truth maker between God and one of his attributes — in violation of the divine simplicity. How can we think or talk about the simple Absolute if all our thinking and talking must have subject-predicate form (or relational or other forms that require distinctions not applicable to the simple God)?
One response would be to bite the bullet and admit that sentences like 'God is powerful' are, and must remain, strictly nonsensical to the discursive intellect. But this nonsense is not mere gibberish, but a Higher Nonsense, an heuristic nonsense whose function is to point us beyond the limits of the discursive intellect while we are operating within it. From the SEP entry:
As severe as Maimonides' position is, even this is not enough. Although negation is preferable to affirmation, even negation is objectionable to the degree that it introduces complexity: God is neither this nor that. What then? Maimonides' reply (GP 1.58) is that ultimately any kind of verbal expression fails us. Rather than provide a precise metaphysical account of the nature of God, the purpose of theological discourse is heuristic: to “conduct the mind toward the utmost reach that man may attain in the apprehension of Him.” Theological language is important to the degree that it eliminates error and sets us along the path of recognizing God's transcendence. Unless one could speak about God, she could easily fall into the trap of thinking that God is corporeal. But in the end, the only thing it reveals is that God is beyond the reach of any subject/predicate proposition. Thus GP 1.59:
Know that when you make an affirmation ascribing another thing to Him, you become more remote from Him in two respects: one of them is that everything You affirm is a perfection only with reference to us, And the other is that He does not possess a thing other than His essence …
Citing Psalm 65, Maimonides concludes that the highest form of praise we can give God is silence.
‘In Your Face’ Islam
This takes the cake.
Thousands of Muslims gathered in protest outside Rome’s Colosseum Friday after Italian authorities shut down a number of so-called “garage mosques” to avoid young people becoming radicalized. They chose the iconic Colosseum, a worldwide symbol of Christian persecution and martyrdom.
In other news, Italian bishops go Left.
Perhaps the complacent Italians need to be reminded that "the sweet life" (la dolce vita) won't be very sweet under Sharia and that an Italy without its Christian antiquities and art treasures won't be a very attractive tourist destination. Italians may no longer care about their culture, but everyone cares about his wallet.