THE greatest academic gig is that of the black philosopher. Spout hackneyed and malicious political slogans and you will be treated as a paragon of wisdom.
George Yancy is a professor of philosophy at Emory University. In addition to being a rising star in the field of “body politics, ” he specializes in Critical Whiteness Studies. That means: “white subject formation, white racist ambush, white opacity and embeddedness, white complicity, white anti-racist praxis.” In other words, he specializes in anti-philosophical racial grievance and intellectual junk.
Read it all. While I disagree with the Housewife on some things, I don't disagree on her assessment of Yancy.
Thanks to the shysters of the ACLU, working within the lawless climate loosed upon the land by Obama and his Department of (Social) Justice, crime rates are spiking. Heather Wilhelm reports.
I have a post on the etymology of 'shyster' which you may enjoy assuming you are not a liberal — or a shyster.
Aquinas says that any given nature can be considered in three ways: in respect of the esse it has in concrete singulars; in respect of the esse it has in minds; absolutely, in the abstract, without reference to either material singulars or minds, and thus without reference to either mode of esse. The two modes are esse naturale (esse reale) and esse intentionale. We can speak of these in English as real existence (being) and intentional existence (being). Real existence is existence 'outside' the (finite) mind. Intentional existence is existence 'in' or 'before' the mind. The mentioned words are obviously not to be taken spatially. Esse is the Latin infinitive, to be. Every human mind is a finite mind, but don't assume the converse.
According to Schopenhauer, the medievals employed but three examples: Socrates, Plato, and an ass. Who am I to deviate from a tradition at once so hoary and noble? So take Socrates. Socrates is human. The nature humanity exists really in him, and in Plato, but not in the ass. The same nature exists intentionally in a mind that thinks about or knows Socrates. For Aquinas, there are no epistemic deputies standing between mind and thing: thought reaches right up to and grasps the thing itself. There is an isomorphism between knowing mind and thing known. The ground of this isomorphism is the natura absoluta, the nature considered absolutely. Call it the common nature (CN). It is so-called because it is common to both the knower and the known, informing both, albeit in different ways. It is also common to all the singulars of the same nature and all the thoughts directed to the same sort of thing. So caninity is common to all doggy thoughts, to all dogs, besides linking the doggy thoughts to the dogs.
Pause to appreciate how attractive this conception is. It secures the intrinsic intelligibility of the world while avoiding the 'gap problem' that bedevils post-Cartesian thought.
I need to know more, however, about the exact ontological status of the common nature (CN) which is, as it were, amphibious as between knowing mind and thing known.
With the help of Anthony Kenny, I realized that there are four possible views, not three as I stated in earlier forays:
A. The CN really exists as a separate, self-subsistent item.
B. The CN exists only intentionally in the mind of one who abstracts it from concrete extramental singulars and mental acts. (Note: a mental act is a concrete singular because in time, though not in space.)
C. The CN has Meinongian Aussersein status: it has no mode of being whatsoever, and yet is is something, not nothing. It actually has properties, it does not merely possibly have them, but is property-incomplete (and therefore in violation of the Law of Excluded Middle) in that it is neither one nor many, neither universal nor particular, neither intentionally existent nor really existent.
D. The CN exists intentionally in the mind of God, the creator.
(A) is a nonstarter and is rejected by both me and Lukas Novak. (B) appears to be Novak's view. (C) is the interpretation I was tentatively suggesting in earlier entries.. My thesis was that the CN must have Aussersein status, but then it inherits — to put it anachronistically — all the problems of Meinongianism. The doctor angelicus ends up in the jungle with a Meinongian monkey on his back.
Let me now try to explain why I reject (B), Novak's view, and incline toward (C), given that (A) cannot possibly be what Aquinas had in mind.
Consider a time t before there were any human animals and any finite minds, and ask yourself: did the nature humanity exist at t? The answer has to be in the negative if there are only two modes of existence, real existence in concrete extramental singulars and intentional existence in finite (creaturely) minds. For at t there were no humans and no finite minds. But surely it is true at t that man is rational, that humanity includes rationality. This implies that humanity at t cannot be just nothing at all. For if it were nothing at all at t, then 'Man is rational'' at t would lack a truth-maker. Furthermore, we surely don't want to say that 'Man is rational' first becomes true when the first human being exists. In some sense, the common nature must be prior to its existential realization in concrete singulars and in minds. The common nature cannot depend on these modes of realization. Kenny quotes Aquinas (Aquinas on Being, Oxford 2002, p. 73):
Socrates is rational, because man is rational, and not vice versa; so that even if Socrates and Plato did not exist, rationality would still be a characteristic of human nature.
Socrates est rationalis, quia homo est rationalis, et non e converso; unde dato quod Socrates et Plato non essent, adhuc humanae naturae rationalitas competeret. (Quodl. VIII, I, c, 108-110)
Aquinas' point could be put like this. (i) At times and in possible worlds in which humans do not exist, it is nevertheless the case that rationality is included in humanity, and (ii) the metaphysical ground of humans' being rational is the circumstance that rationality is included in humanity, and not vice versa.
Now this obviously implies that the common nature humanity has some sort of status independent of real and intentional existence. So we either go the Meinongian route or we say that comon natures exist in the mind of God. Kenny:
Aquinas' solution is to invoke the divine mind. There are really four, not three ways of considering natures: first, as they are in the mind of the creator; second, as they are in the abstract; third, as they are in individuals; and finally, as they are in the human mind. (p. 74)
This may seem to solve the problem I raised. Common natures are not nothing because they are divine accusatives. And they are not nothing in virtue of being ausserseiend. This solution avoids the three options of Platonism, subjectivism (according to which CNs exist only as products of abstraction), and Meinongianism.
The problem with the solution is that it smacks of deus ex machina: God is brought in to solve the problem similarly as Descartes had recourse to the divine veracity to solve the problem of the external world. Solutions to the problems of universals, predication, and intentionality ought to be possible without bringing God into the picture.
Ulysses had himself bound to the mast and the ears of his sailors plugged with wax lest the ravishing strains of the sea nymphs' song reach their ears and cause them to cast themselves into the sea and into their doom. But what song did the Sirens sing, and in what key? And what about the nymphs themselves? Were their tresses of golden hue? And how long were they? Were the nymphs equipped with special nautical brassieres to protect their tender nipples from rude contact with jelly fish and such?
One cannot sing a song without singing some definite song in some definite key commencing at some definite time and ending at some definite later time.
But you understand the story of Ulysses and the Sirens and you are now thinking about the song they sang. And you are thinking about the nymphs and their ravishing endowments. But what sorts of objects are these? Incomplete objects. Are there then in reality incomplete objects?
Exactly what does ‘refer’ mean? And when we talk about ‘direct reference’ and ‘indirect reference’, are we really talking about exactly the same relation, or only the same in name?
The second question got me thinking.
The paradigms of direct reference are the indexicals and the demonstratives. The English letter 'I' is not the English word 'I,' and the word 'I' — the first-person singular pronoun — has non-indexical uses. But let's consider a standard indexical use of this pronoun. Tom says to Tina, "I'm hungry." Tom refers to himself directly using 'I.' That means: Tom refers to himself, but not via a description that he uniquely satisfies. The reference is not routed through a reference-mediating sense. If you think it is so routed, tell me what the reference-mediating sense of your indexical uses of the first person singular pronoun is. I wish you the best of luck.
As I understand it, to say of a singular term that it is directly referential is not to say that it lacks sense, but that it lacks a reference-determining sense. If a term has a reference-determining sense, then the reference of that term is 'routed though' or 'focused by' the sense: the term picks out whatever satisfies the sense, if anything satisfies it. The indexical 'now' does have a sense in that whatever it picks out must be a time, indeed, a time that is present. But this very general sense does not make a use of 'now' refer to the precise time to which it refers. So 'now' is directly referential despite its having a sense.
Consider the demonstrative 'this.' Pointing to a poker, I say 'This is hot.' You agree and say 'This is hot!' We point to the same thing and we say the same thing. The same thing we say is the proposition. The proposition is true. Neither the poker nor its degree of heat are true. The reference of 'this' is direct. It seems to follow that the poker itself is a constituent of the proposition that is before both of our minds and that we agree is true. The poker itself is a constituent of the proposition, not an abstract and immaterial surrogate or representative of the material poker. But then propositions are Russellian as opposed to Fregean. The poker itself, not an abstract surrogate such as a Fregean sense, is a constituent of the proposition.
How can this be? I grasp (understand) the proposition. So I grasp its constituents. (Assumption: I cannot understand a proposition unless I understand its logical parts. Compositionality of meaning.) One of the constituents is the poker itself. But how is it possible for my poor little finite mind to grasp the hot poker in all its infinitely-propertied reality? How can I get that massive chunk of external reality with all its properties before my puny little intellectus ectypus? Here is an aporetic triad for your delectation:
The proposition is in or before my mind. The hot poker is a constituent of the proposition. The hot poker is not in or before my mind.
How will you solve this bad boy? The first limb is well-nigh datanic. Since I understand the proposition expressed by 'This is hot' asserted while pointing to a hot poker, the proposition is before my mind. So we must either deny the second or the third limb.
My tendency is to deny the second limb and affirm that all propositions are Fregean. If all propositions are Fregean, then no proposition has as a constituent an infinitely-propertied material object such as a red-hot poker.
But if I say this, then it seems that I cannot say that the reference of 'this' is direct. But if not direct, then mediated by sense. What then is the sense of 'this'? What is the meaning of 'this'?
Or we could say the following: there is direct reference all right, but not to an infinitely-propertied chunk of physical reality, but to an incomplete object, something like what Hector-Neri Castaneda calls an "ontological guise." It is a Meinongian sort of item and involves us in the difficulties of Meinongianism.
London Ed will not like this answer one bit.
To say that a singular term t indirectly refers to object o is to say two things. (i) It is to say that there is a description D(t) that gives the sense of t, a description which is such that anything that satisfies it uniquely satisfies it. (ii) And it is to say that o uniquely satisfies D(t).
Note that for the indirect reference relation to hold there needn't be any real-world connection such as a causal connection between one's use of t and o. It is just a matter of whether or not o uniquely satisfies the description encapsulated by t. Satisfaction is a 'logical' relation. It is like the 'falling-under' relation. Ed falls under the concept Londoner. The relation of falling-under is not 'real': it is not causal or spatial or temporal or a physical part-whole relation. It is a 'logical' relation.
Indirect reference is just unique satisfaction by an item of a description encapsulated in a term. If 'Socrates' refers indirectly, then it refers to whatever satisfies some such definite description as 'the teacher of Plato.' (Or perhaps a Searlean disjunction of definite descriptions.) Direct reference, on the other hand, has nothing to do with satisfaction of a description.
So I think London Ed is on to something. When we talk about ‘direct reference’ and ‘indirect reference’, we are not talking about exactly the same relation. The two phrases have only a word in common, 'reference.' If all reference is indirect, then direct reference is not reference. And if all reference is direct, then indirect reference is not reference. There are not two kinds of reference. Only the word is in common.
The reason, again, is that indirect reference is just unique satisfaction of a description whereas direct reference has nothing to do with satisfaction of a description. This is even more obvious if the direct reference theorist brings causation into the picture.
One of the curiosities of the reign of Barack Obama is that while he has vastly increased the power of the state domestically, when it comes to the world outside, to national security, he has gravely weakened the United States, both physically, in terms of its military strength, and psychologically, in terms of that diffuse but indisputably potent resource, prestige. ISIS rages, Russia buzzes our warships and reconnaissance planes, China militarizes the South China Sea. We do . . . nothing.
The Collected Poems and Epigrams of J. V. Cunningham, Chicago, The Swallow Press, 1971.
Epigram 57
Here lies my wife. Eternal peace Be to us both with her decease.
Epigram 59
I married in my youth a wife. She was my own, my very first. She gave the best years of her life. I hope nobody gets the worst.
J. V. Cunningham is the model for John Williams' 1965 novel Stoner. An underappreciated and unfortunately titled masterpiece, it is about one William Stoner, an obscure professor of English at the University of Missouri, Columbia. At its publication in '65 it pretty much fell still-born from the press, but the years have been kind to it and it is now valued as the great novel that it is. Unfortunately, Williams, who died in 1994, did not live to see its success.
(4.) John Williams, Stoner (1965). Based on the life of J. V. Cunningham and especially his disastrous marriage to Barbara Gibbs. Easily the best novel ever written about the determined renunciations and quiet joys of the scholarly life. Stoner suffers reversal after reversal—a bad marriage, persecution at the hands of his department chair, the forced breakup of a brief and fulfilling love affair with a younger scholar—but he endures because of two things: his love for his daughter, who wants nothing more than to spend time with her father while he writes his scholarship, and his work on the English Renaissance. His end is tragic, but Stoner does not experience it that way. A genuinely unforgettable reading experience.
"Genuinely unforgettable" sounds like hype, but this is one novel I, for one, will not forget. For more by Myers on Stoner, see here.
My copy of the novel sports a blurb by Myers: "It will remind you of why you started reading novels: to get inside the mystery of other people's lives." Yes.
Some say age is only a number. Not quite. It is a number that measures something. You may as well say that temperature is only a number; you are only as hot as you feel.
Face reality, but don't exaggerate how bad things are.
I prefer the Firefox browser to Google Chrome, but the former crashes on a regular basis, like every other day. Yes, I have done the obvious things like make sure I am running the latest version. I take it that others have this crash problem. Any suggestions?
